Top marks to Jay Pipes for getting the Forge 2.0 finally out after quite some time, as well as in the midst of the MySQL Conference he is organizing.
I am worried however about some of the content, as shown in the screenshot below, the opening page lists Worklog tasks/features for versions 6.x or 7.x , that’s ok, but features in 9.x. Where is the practicality of thinking more then 2 releases ahead, and just having a future bucket. Indeed, we have 5.1 and 6.0 already frozen and not releases, so 6.x is already 3 releases out.
Tonight we were told at the NY PHP Meeting MySQL 5.1 is not due to late Q2, so that’s at least June 2008.
The MySQL 5.1 Release Notes reveals a history that I don’t find very flattering.
- MySQL 5.1.3 (29 November 2005)
- MySQL 5.1.9 (12 April 2006) *First reported beta via docs
- MySQL 5.1.22 (24 September 2007: Release Candidate)
I hope that Sun will take on board this very slow release cycle of producing GA products, the last version MySQL 5.0.15 (19 October 2005: Production) 2 years and 6 months ago.
I’m even more interested then previously in the ultimate release and success of MySQL 5.1 as this is a pre-requisite of my new employer’s key product the PBXT Storage Engine for MySQL.
Heh, good catch, Ronald. I agree with you on your points about the release cycle being shortened, and I know that Jeffrey Pugh is also interested in shortening the cycle. I don’t envy Jeffrey’s job of actually making that happen, though, especially with all the recent Sun distraction… As for why the Forge shows things like “9.x” and not “future bucket”, that’s fairly simple to answer. The forge pulls public tasks (~90% of the internal tasks, BTW) from the MySQL internal worklog database. The worklog application, as you know, is a bit dated and a little tricky to use. It works in a agile methodology way of bucketing out stuff for scrums, current, and long-term stuff. However, the categories are indeed a bit specific, and there isn’t a catchall for “future stuff we have no idea where this will go”… So, someone probably just put it in the 9.x bucket knowing somewhere down the line it would be put into a more realistic bucket. Jeffrey might have some more comments for ya, though. I’ve pinged him with this blog entry.
Cheers, mate!
-jay
Jay is 100% right; Worklog only lets you use a number for the Version field, and if you leave it blank it appears in all reports. So 9.x means “Some future version” for the moment.
As for 5.1 release date: Yes, the 5.0->5.1 gap of 2.5 years is distressing, but the last 2.5 years have been spent stabilizing 5.0 as well as 5.1. Approximately 50% of the bugs fixed affected *both* versions, and I think users and customers have seen the difference in the improved versions of 5.0 since 5.0.15.
We’re working on the third RC for 5.1; I won’t claim (yet) it will be the last, but it’s looking much more hopeful. The team is doing an incredible job fixing bugs according to triage criteria we talked about in September 2007.
As for future releases: the main way to shorten release cycles is to do more parallel development. That’s been difficult (we have a pretty small Server team), but you already see 6.0-Alpha with Falcon, connection pooling, and subquery optimization, and you’ll start to see some 6.1 Previews soon (watch for Batched Key Access). We’re making progress on Foreign Keys as well.
We’re all determined to make future releases happen faster without sacrificing quality, but I appreciate yours (and others) suggestions on how we can improve that. Catch me at the Users Conference in mid-April!
Jeffrey