Dear MonetDB user and developers,

given the growing MonetDB community, it becomes ever more important to have a proper version management for and properly made "stable" versions of MonetDB.

The purpose of this mail is to (1) initiate a new approach that tries to find a compromise between "user needs" and available "developer and maintainer man-hours"; and (2) ask for feedback, discussion, and ideas about this approach that will hopefully lead to an "even better" solution ;-)

Well, here are my late-night ideas:

To have a common starting point, I just tagged the most recent CVS version of MonetDB as "MonetDB_4-3-16_rc01", i.e., it's supposed to be the first release candidate for the to-be-made new "stable" MonetDB-4.3.16.

I'd like to encourage all MonetDB "users" of you to spend some (spare?) time to download this version, and test it with you usual MonetDB tasks. Well, as usual, there is of course now "guarantee", hence, it might be a good idea to have this version running next to your current "stable"/"production" version of MonetDB, rather than immediately replacing the latter.

Yes, there will be things that work differently, or do not work at all (without any changes on your side). I kindly ask you, to report all these issues to us "developers", preferably as bug reports and feature requests via SF or simply via mail to monet@cwi.nl. Since we ("developers") have no complete overview of your ("users") local setting, we need your help in making the next stable version of MonetDB both stable and convenient to use for you. Moreover, this kind of "beta-testing" extends our usual automatic testing that we do every night anyway. So far, we can only say that a stable version is/was "stable" with respect to the test set we use for automatic testing (cf. http://monetdb.cwi.nl/TestWeb). However, not all aspects of MonetDB are covered by the tests, yet(?). We will added as many of your reports as possible to the test set, hence (most of) the "beta-test" will become automatic in the future. However, various scenarios simply cannot be reproduced in the automatic testing, e.g., as they require a setup that is simply too big or runs too long. Hence, please do help us, and you'll (hopefully) eventually be rewarded with a new "stable" MonetDB that deserves this attribute from the very day of its birth.

Now to you fellow developers and maintainers ;-)

Next to helping out in fixing the floods of bugs that will be sent towards us after the request above, my major question is about your plans for current and future developments: Which new features should be in 4.3.16 and which can/should better wait until thereafter. The main reason for this question is, that we should provide clear cuts to the users, which features are in which version of MonetDB.

Timing:

Given some "external constraints" (;-), I plan to release the "user-tested" ("user-approved"?) MonetDB 4.3.16 no later than April 14 2004, i.e., in about 6 weeks. So please keep this in mind when planning your contributions in the above scenario.

During these 6 weeks, we will tag further release candidates and ask users for help in testing them (at least on all those tests/scenarios we could not add to test automatic test set for whatever reason).

Ok, this is my first late-night shot about this issue. As I said, it's just a proposal. Nothing's carved in stone, yet (apart from this mail and the CVS tag ;-), so please do comment on this and state your opinion, what ever it might be!

Thank you very much in advance!

Good night,

Stefan