On Thu, Dec 11, 2014 at 8:03 AM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
2. The amount of pre-release testing we get from people outside the hard-core development crowd seems to be continuing to decrease. We were fortunate that somebody found the JSONB issue before it was too late to do anything about it. Personally, I'm very worried that there are other such bugs in 9.4. But I've given up hoping that any more testing will happen until we put out something that calls itself 9.4.0, which is why I voted to release in the core discussion about it.
We are not particularly inviting of feedback for whatever testing has been done.
You can report tests by email. You can subscribe to any PostgreSQL mailing list from the subscription form.
pgsql-bugs: this is the preferred mailing list if you think you have found a bug in the beta. You can also use the Bug Reporting Form.
pgsql-hackers: bugs, questions, and successful test reports are welcome here if you are already subscribed to pgsql-hackers. Note that pgsql-hackers is a high-traffic mailing list with a lot of development discussion.
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So if you find a bug, you can report it on the bug reporting form (which doesn't have a drop-down entry for 9.4RC1).
If you have positive results rather than negative ones (or even complaints that are not actually bugs), you can subscribe to a mailing list which generates a lot of traffic which is probably over your head and not interesting to you.
Does the core team keep a mental list of items they want to see tested by the public, and they will spend their own time testing those things themselves if they don't hear back on some positive tests for them?
If we find reports of public testing that yields good results (or at least no bugs) to be useful, we should be more clear on how to go about doing it. But are positive reports useful? If I report a bug, I can write down the steps to reproduce it, and then follow my own instructions to make sure it does actually reproduce it. If I find no bugs, it is just "I did a bunch of random stuff and nothing bad happened, that I noticed".
