David M Williams
Wednesday, 25 February 2009 18:38
IT Industry -
Market
Page 2 of 3
“If you plan to use any of the new features of MySQL 5.1, regard these as if they would be of beta quality,” he said.
“We still have 20 known and tagged crashing and wrong result bugs in 5.1, 35 more if we add the known crashing bugs from 5.0 that are likely to also be present in 5.1.”
“We still have re than 180 serious bugs ... in 5.1.”
Monty also listed some example of older bugs that he believed definitely ought to have been fixed in 5.1 prior to it being marked as GA. Additionally, he listed a specific replication bug that he claimed “is such a serious issue that it should have stopped a GA release!”
It was pretty clear Monty was unimpressed with Sun’s marketing machine listing MySQL 5.1 as ready for business when he strongly felt this was not the case. In fact, he even went on to criticise his employer’s press release saying that an announced feature, “new SQL diagnostic aids and performance utilities” did not mean anything and lacked substance.
Monty explained his view of why the project went off the rails. Some of these problems were due to core developers leaving the company and new programmers coming in without sufficient in-depth product knowledge.
Yet, his most insightful criticism is to do with Sun Microsystems itself. Monty states, “We have changed the release model so that instead of focusing on quality and features our release is now defined by timeliness and features.”
“Quality is not regarded to be that important,” he said.
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