On Fri, 21 Sep 2007, Tom Lane wrote:
> Cristian Gafton <gafton@stripped> writes:
>> Most of the major distributions do have a development/unstable/bleeding
>> edge branch where things get rebuilt and upgraded to the latest and
>> greatest release on an almost nightly bassis. What is surprizing to a lot
>> of people is the number of users who like living on the bleeding edge and
>> provide instantaneous feedback when someting doesn't look right. By not
>> actively participating in that process I think MySQL is missing out big
>> time on some of the best release engineering QA available anywere, period.
>
> Hmm ... seems to me that database users are a category where that rule
> doesn't hold: if you are running any sort of traditional database
> application then you care about data safety above most other things,
> and are very unlikely to want to run "bleeding edge" code in any shape
> or description.
I think that is true regardless of whether we're talking about databases
or not - as people start to care about their data, their willingness to
deal with bleeding edge goes away. *But*, for every user that decides "I'm
gonna stop living dangerously" there is always some other new folks,
willing to give the current stuff on rawhide/development a try. Until they
accumulate data that they start to care about... It's not the same people
testing every build again and again - it's cyclical, and the cycles are
tied to the nature and purpose of the software apps. At any rate, most of
these guys can be prodded into testing with a simple request to "hey, back
up your data and give this a try". It's surprizing how many are willing to
donate their time.
> Whether you buy the database-specific part of that argument or not,
> I do find MySQL AB's current release policies to be a bit peculiar: it
> looks like they think enterprise customers would like to run bleeding
> edge code more than the general hacker community would. This seems
> improbable, and certainly not in agreement with the way Red Hat has made
> money lately.
Yepp, and then there is also the unwritten rule that as the time between
releases gets longer, the release quality expectation from the user base
seems to increase accordingly. I have seen many times people get jaded on
simple statements like "they took X months to release this?!"
Now back to the original question that started the thread - the non-paying
user community seems to be asking how can they be of better service/value
to MySQL. What would be the ideal relationship between the various Linux
distros and MySQL, as far as publishing releases to the public at large?
My general impression so far is that there are a lot of peopler inside
MySQL (the company) who which they had an answer to that...
Cristian
--
Cristian Gafton
rPath, Inc.
