2.2.9 Release Philosophy - No Known Bugs in Releases

We put a lot of time and effort into making our releases bug free. To our knowledge, we have not released a single MySQL version with any known 'fatal' repeatable bugs.

A fatal bug is something that crashes MySQL under normal usage, gives wrong answers for normal queries, or has a security problem.

We have documented all open problems, bugs and things that are dependent on design decisions. See section 1.8.6 Known Errors and Design Deficiencies in MySQL.

Our aim is to fix everything that is fixable, but without risking making a stable MySQL version less stable. In certain cases, this means we can fix an issue in the development version(s), but not in the stable (production) version. Naturally, we document such issues so that users are aware.

Here is a description of how our build process works:

• We monitor bugs from our customer support list, the MySQL external mailing lists and the bugs database at http://bugs.mysql.com/.
• All reported bugs for live versions are entered into the bugs database.
• When we fix a bug, we always try to make a test case of it and include this into our test system to ensure that the bug will never come back. (About 90% of all fixed bugs have a test case.)
• We also create test cases for all new features we add to MySQL.
• Before we start to build a new MySQL release, we ensure that all reported repeatable bugs for the MySQL version (3.23.x, 4.0.x, etc) are fixed. If something is impossible to fix (because some internal design decision in MySQL) we document this in the manual. See section 1.8.6 Known Errors and Design Deficiencies in MySQL.
• We do a build on all platforms for which we support binaries (15+ platforms) and run our test suite and benchmark suite on all of them.
• We will not publish a binary for a platform for which the test or benchmark suite fails. If it's a general error in the source, we fix this and do the build plus tests on all systems again, from scratch.
• If we, during the build and test process (which takes 2-3 days), receive a report regarding a fatal bug (for example, one that causes a core dump), we fix this and restart the build process.
• After publishing the binaries on http://www.mysql.com/, we send out an announce email on the lists mysql@lists.mysql.com and announce@lists.mysql.com. The announce message contains a list of all changes to the release and any known problems with the release. (The 'known problems' section in the release notes has only been needed in a handful of releases.)
• To quickly give our users access to the latest MySQL features, we do a new MySQL release every 4-5 weeks.
• If we, after the release is done, get any bug reports that there was (after all) anything critically wrong with the build on a specific platform, we will fix this at once and build a new 'a' release for that platform. Thanks to our large user base, problems are found quickly.
• Our track record for making good releases is quite good. In the last 150 releases, we had to do a new build for less than 10 releases (in 3 of these cases, the bug was a faulty glibc library on one of our build machines that took us a long time to track down).

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