I am being interviewed by OReilly

"Joshua D. Drake" <jd@commandprompt.com> writes:

Oreilly and Assoc is interviewing me and they asked me two questions I
don't have the answers to:
When is 7.3 set to land?
When is 8.0 set to land?

7.3 will go beta at the end of August, barring major disasters.
As for final release, it's done when it's done --- the optimistic
schedule would be end of September, but we do not release by the
calendar. We release when we think the code is ready.

There is no plan anywhere that involves an 8.0; if anyone thinks
they know how many 7.* releases there will be, when 8.0 will be
out, or what will be in it, they are just blowing smoke. We have
a hard enough time seeing ahead to the next release...

regards, tom lane

On Wed, Jul 03, 2002 at 01:46:46PM -0700, Joshua D. Drake wrote:

When is 7.3 set to land?

When is 8.0 set to land?

As a matter of curiosity, what would constitute "8.0" as opposed to,
say, 7.4? (I know that 7.0 happened partly because a great whack of
new features went in, but I haven't found anything in the -hackers
archives to explain why the number change. Maybe it's just a phase
of the moon thing, or something.)

A

-- 
----
Andrew Sullivan                               87 Mowat Avenue 
Liberty RMS                           Toronto, Ontario Canada
<andrew@libertyrms.info>                              M6K 3E3
                                         +1 416 646 3304 x110

When is 8.0 set to land?

You might point out that every release is an 8.0 by the pathetic
standards now used by many or most products for labeling releases.

We take a perverse pride in versioning The Old Fashioned Way, perhaps to
an extreme ;)

- Thomas

Andrew Sullivan wrote:

On Wed, Jul 03, 2002 at 01:46:46PM -0700, Joshua D. Drake wrote:

When is 7.3 set to land?

When is 8.0 set to land?

As a matter of curiosity, what would constitute "8.0" as opposed to,
say, 7.4? (I know that 7.0 happened partly because a great whack of
new features went in, but I haven't found anything in the -hackers
archives to explain why the number change. Maybe it's just a phase
of the moon thing, or something.)

Actually, it was a wack of new features in 6.5 when we realized we had
to up the version on the next release. I think multi-master replication
would be an 8.0 item, and point-in-time recovery.

-- 
  Bruce Momjian                        |  http://candle.pha.pa.us
  pgman@candle.pha.pa.us               |  (610) 853-3000
  +  If your life is a hard drive,     |  830 Blythe Avenue
  +  Christ can be your backup.        |  Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania 19026

Andrew Sullivan <andrew@libertyrms.info> writes:

As a matter of curiosity, what would constitute "8.0" as opposed to,
say, 7.4? (I know that 7.0 happened partly because a great whack of
new features went in, but I haven't found anything in the -hackers
archives to explain why the number change. Maybe it's just a phase
of the moon thing, or something.)

I remember quite a deal of argument about whether to call it 7.0 or 6.6;
we had started that cycle with the assumption that it would be called
6.6, and changed our minds near the end. Personally I'd have preferred
to stick the 7.* label on starting with the next release (actually
called 7.1) which had WAL and TOAST in it. That was really a
significant set of changes, both on the inside and outside.

You could make a fair argument that the upcoming 7.3 ought to be
called 8.0, because the addition of schema support will break an
awful lot of client-side code ;-). But I doubt we will do that.

regards, tom lane

Tom Lane wrote:

Andrew Sullivan <andrew@libertyrms.info> writes:

As a matter of curiosity, what would constitute "8.0" as opposed to,
say, 7.4? (I know that 7.0 happened partly because a great whack of
new features went in, but I haven't found anything in the -hackers
archives to explain why the number change. Maybe it's just a phase
of the moon thing, or something.)

I remember quite a deal of argument about whether to call it 7.0 or 6.6;
we had started that cycle with the assumption that it would be called
6.6, and changed our minds near the end. Personally I'd have preferred
to stick the 7.* label on starting with the next release (actually
called 7.1) which had WAL and TOAST in it. That was really a
significant set of changes, both on the inside and outside.

You could make a fair argument that the upcoming 7.3 ought to be
called 8.0, because the addition of schema support will break an
awful lot of client-side code ;-). But I doubt we will do that.

Yes, the problem with incrementing on major features is that we would
start to look like Emacs numbering fairly quickly.

At some point, we may have to modify our name and start at 1.0 again.

-- 
  Bruce Momjian                        |  http://candle.pha.pa.us
  pgman@candle.pha.pa.us               |  (610) 853-3000
  +  If your life is a hard drive,     |  830 Blythe Avenue
  +  Christ can be your backup.        |  Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania 19026

Tom Lane wrote:

You could make a fair argument that the upcoming 7.3 ought to be
called 8.0, because the addition of schema support

Star-schema support?

will break an

Bruce Momjian wrote:

<snip>

At some point, we may have to modify our name and start at 1.0 again.

Heh Heh Heh

Let's do the M$ trick and pick a name that everyone will confuse and
assume it's us:

"Standard SQL 1.0".

So when people use the popularity question for deciding their database
"what database does everyone else use? I just want the standard one..."

We win. :)

+ Justin

--
Bruce Momjian                        |  http://candle.pha.pa.us
pgman@candle.pha.pa.us               |  (610) 853-3000
+  If your life is a hard drive,     |  830 Blythe Avenue
+  Christ can be your backup.        |  Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania 19026

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--
"My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those
who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
first group; there was less competition there."
- Indira Gandhi

On Thu, 4 Jul 2002, Tom Lane wrote:

You could make a fair argument that the upcoming 7.3 ought to be called
8.0, because the addition of schema support will break an awful lot of
client-side code ;-). But I doubt we will do that.

Actually, from reading that thread, I started to think along those lines
too ... it is a major change, is there a reason why going to 8.0 on this
one is a bad idea? I realize that its *only* been 2 years that we've been
in v7.0 ... :) v7.0 was released back in Mar of 2000 ... so its almost
2.5 years ...

I don't necessarily agree with Bruce's thought that distributed
replication would be the marker, since there is no set path to that right
now, nor is there, I believe, enough knowledge about whether or not bring
such in will affect anyting other then the backend itself ...

With this next release, we are looking at breaking the front-end apps, as
I understand it ... I think that's pretty drastic of a change to force
going to 8.0 ...

We don't release fast, or often, so our v7.2 is like some other projects
v7.26, at the rate some of them release ...

I'd like to see this next release go to 8.0 ...

On Thu, 4 Jul 2002, Bruce Momjian wrote:

Tom Lane wrote:

Andrew Sullivan <andrew@libertyrms.info> writes:

As a matter of curiosity, what would constitute "8.0" as opposed to,
say, 7.4? (I know that 7.0 happened partly because a great whack of
new features went in, but I haven't found anything in the -hackers
archives to explain why the number change. Maybe it's just a phase
of the moon thing, or something.)

I remember quite a deal of argument about whether to call it 7.0 or 6.6;
we had started that cycle with the assumption that it would be called
6.6, and changed our minds near the end. Personally I'd have preferred
to stick the 7.* label on starting with the next release (actually
called 7.1) which had WAL and TOAST in it. That was really a
significant set of changes, both on the inside and outside.

You could make a fair argument that the upcoming 7.3 ought to be
called 8.0, because the addition of schema support will break an
awful lot of client-side code ;-). But I doubt we will do that.

Yes, the problem with incrementing on major features is that we would
start to look like Emacs numbering fairly quickly.

At 2.5years in v7.x, I think its going to be a long while before we start
getting into the 20's :)

At some point, we may have to modify our name and start at 1.0 again.

Ya, that's it ... we've only spent, what, 8 years now making 'PostgreSQL'
known, so let's change the name *just* so that we can start at 1.0 and
face a new challenge of getting ppl to recognize the name?

With this next release, we are looking at breaking the front-end apps, as
I understand it ... I think that's pretty drastic of a change to force
going to 8.0 ...

We don't release fast, or often, so our v7.2 is like some other projects
v7.26, at the rate some of them release ...

I'd like to see this next release go to 8.0 ...

Hmmm...makes sense. I'd be for it.

BTW - has anyone looked at Neil's PREPARE patch yet?

Chris

"Marc G. Fournier" <scrappy@hub.org> writes:

At some point, we may have to modify our name and start at 1.0 again.

Ya, that's it ... we've only spent, what, 8 years now making 'PostgreSQL'
known, so let's change the name *just* so that we can start at 1.0 and
face a new challenge of getting ppl to recognize the name?

I've heard a number of people opine that we should go back to just plain
'Postgres', which is pronounceable by the uninitiate, and besides which
that's what we use informally most of the time. 'PostgreSQL' is about
as marketing-unfriendly a name as you could easily find...

I'd not be in favor of picking something new out of the blue, but I'd
pick 'Postgres' over 'PostgreSQL' if it were up to me.

regards, tom lane

Tom Lane wrote:

"Marc G. Fournier" <scrappy@hub.org> writes:

At some point, we may have to modify our name and start at 1.0 again.

Ya, that's it ... we've only spent, what, 8 years now making 'PostgreSQL'
known, so let's change the name *just* so that we can start at 1.0 and
face a new challenge of getting ppl to recognize the name?

I've heard a number of people opine that we should go back to just plain
'Postgres', which is pronounceable by the uninitiate, and besides which
that's what we use informally most of the time. 'PostgreSQL' is about
as marketing-unfriendly a name as you could easily find...

I personally agree.

-- 
  Bruce Momjian                        |  http://candle.pha.pa.us
  pgman@candle.pha.pa.us               |  (610) 853-3000
  +  If your life is a hard drive,     |  830 Blythe Avenue
  +  Christ can be your backup.        |  Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania 19026

"Marc G. Fournier" wrote:

On Thu, 4 Jul 2002, Tom Lane wrote:

<snip>

We can also go any number in between... like "7.5"...

:)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

I'd like to see this next release go to 8.0 ...

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--
"My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those
who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
first group; there was less competition there."
- Indira Gandhi

While there are big changes between 7.2 and the next release, they
aren't really any bigger than others during the 7.x series. I don't
really feel that the next release is worth an 8.0 rather than a 7.3. But
this is just an opinion; it's not something I'm prepared to argue about.

cjs
--
Curt Sampson <cjs@cynic.net> +81 90 7737 2974 http://www.netbsd.org
Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light. --XTC

On Thu, 4 Jul 2002, Tom Lane wrote:

I'd not be in favor of picking something new out of the blue, but I'd
pick 'Postgres' over 'PostgreSQL' if it were up to me.

As I recall the only real reason for the change was to emphasize that
the query language had changed to SQL. Back in my young and naive days
(probably early '95) I remember picking up Postgres, realizing it didn't
use SQL as the query language, thinking, "How terrible!" and immediately
dropping it for MySQL. (I'm older and wiser now, but it's too late--all
the systems that let you use something less crappy than SQL are now
gone. *Sigh*.) Anyway, I expect that others had the same experience, and
thus something like that was required to get people who had previously
dropped it to go back to it again.

Now that QUEL or PostQUEL or whatever it was is long gone and fogotten
(except maybe in certain CA-Unicenter shops), I see no reason we
couldn't go back to "Postgres" now.

cjs
--
Curt Sampson <cjs@cynic.net> +81 90 7737 2974 http://www.netbsd.org
Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light. --XTC

In my book, schema support is a big thing, leading to rethink a lot of
database organization and such. PostgreSQL 8 would stress this
importance.

--
Alessio F. Bragadini alessio@albourne.com
APL Financial Services http://village.albourne.com
Nicosia, Cyprus phone: +357-22-755750

"It is more complicated than you think"
-- The Eighth Networking Truth from RFC 1925

On Fri, 5 Jul 2002, Curt Sampson wrote:

While there are big changes between 7.2 and the next release, they
aren't really any bigger than others during the 7.x series. I don't
really feel that the next release is worth an 8.0 rather than a 7.3. But
this is just an opinion; it's not something I'm prepared to argue about.

Actually, the "big" change is such that will, at least as far as I'm
understanding it, break pretty much every front-end applicaiton ... which,
I'm guessing, is pretty major, no? :)

On Thu, 4 Jul 2002, Tom Lane wrote:

"Marc G. Fournier" <scrappy@hub.org> writes:

At some point, we may have to modify our name and start at 1.0 again.

Ya, that's it ... we've only spent, what, 8 years now making 'PostgreSQL'
known, so let's change the name *just* so that we can start at 1.0 and
face a new challenge of getting ppl to recognize the name?

I've heard a number of people opine that we should go back to just plain
'Postgres', which is pronounceable by the uninitiate, and besides which

I can never figure this out ... what is so difficult about 'Postgres-Q-L'?