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From: mer@postgres.berkeley.edu (Jeff Meredith)
Subject: clown suit
To: postgres@postgres.berkeley.edu
Sender: pg_adm@postgres.berkeley.edu
Date: Wed, 08 Apr 92 11:41:35 PDT


I would like to relate a brief story about a salesman for a popular software
vendor both of which shall remain nameless.  This salesman, who I will
refer to as Bob, had a habit of making promises of wonderful functionality
and ambitious release dates with which the vendor's developement team could
not keep up.  Bob would make the promises and then go back to home base
insisting that this and that had to be done by such and such a date.  When
the developement team failed to produce the promised results Bob found
himself in a serious jam.  The customers were going to be *very* unhappy
with him.  Unhappy customers translates into one less Mercedes in Bob's
garage.  This was not acceptable so clearly some decisive action needed to
be taken.  On his next trip to the customer site Bob rented a blue and red
clown outfit, painted his face, wore huge shoes and a red bubble nose.
He went bounding in to the customer's executive meeting room, horns a blowin',
and proclaimed that none of his promises were going to be kept.  While the
executives were unhappy about this news they laughed so hard at Bob's get
up that they couldn't be mad for very long.  Bob managed to keep the account
and his wife got her new car.

The point to this story is that the Postgres group is not ready to release
version 4 of the system.  Our developers are getting very distracted by
ungodly course loads and midterm/final exam schedules from h*ll.  So we are
donning our respective clown suits and hoping that you will understand.
The release will be put off until the semester ends when we can get our
students to put in some serious hours on it.  Look for it around the begin-
ning of June.


Many Apologies,

Jeff Meredith
mer@postgres.berkeley.edu