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2.1.2.4. Release Philosophy—No Known Bugs in Releases

We put considerable time and effort into making our releases bug-free. Our policy is never to release a version of MySQL intended for production use that has any known fatal, repeatable bugs.

We have documented all open problems, bugs, and issues that are dependent on design decisions. See Section B.1.8, “Known Issues in MySQL”.

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

Here is a description of our build process:

  • We monitor bugs from our customer support list, the bugs database at http://bugs.mysql.com/, and the MySQL external mailing lists.

  • 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 for it and include it into our test system to ensure that the bug can never recur without being detected. (About 90% of all fixed bugs have test cases.)

  • We create test cases for each new feature that we add to MySQL.

  • Before we start to build a new MySQL release, we ensure that all reported repeatable bugs for that MySQL version (3.23.x, 4.0.x, 4.1.x, 5.0.x, 5.1.x, and so on) are fixed. If something is impossible to fix due to some internal design decision in MySQL, we document this in the manual. See Section B.1.8, “Known Issues in MySQL”.

  • We do a build on all platforms for which we support binaries and run our test suite and benchmark suite on all of them.

  • We do not publish a binary for a platform for which the test or benchmark suite fails. If the problem is due to a general error in the source, we fix it and do the build plus tests on all systems again from scratch.

  • The build and test process takes a week. If we receive a report regarding a fatal bug during this process (for example, one that causes a core dump), we fix the problem and restart the build process.

  • After publishing the binaries on http://dev.mysql.com/, we send out an announcement message to the mysql and announce mailing lists. See Section 1.7.1, “MySQL Mailing Lists”. The announcement 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 been needed for only a handful of releases.

  • To quickly give our users access to the latest MySQL features, we try to produce a new MySQL release every 4-8 weeks. Source code snapshots are built daily and are available at http://downloads.mysql.com/snapshots.php.

  • If, despite our best efforts, we receive any bug reports after a release is issued that a critical problem exists for the build on a specific platform, we fix it at once and build a new 'a' release for that platform. Thanks to our large user base, problems are found and resolved very quickly.

  • Our track record for making stable releases is quite good. In the last 150 releases, we had to do a new build for fewer than 10 of them. In three 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.