I'm not sure I care what the version number is (5.3,5.4,5.4,6.0), and you can talk about milestone releases all you want. What really matters to me is when we'll have something beyond 5.1 marked as GA. Will it be 5.5? When should I expect that?

5.4 was announced last year at the conference with lots of performance fixes for the mysql server itself. Great. Until those changes percolate up into a stable release, they aren't worth too much to me. With all the hoopla about the release cycle, I haven't seen any results in the form of new features/fixes making it to stable any faster than 5.1 did.

What's the point of any release cycle beyond getting good solid code to stable in a timely (i.e., not 3 years) and safe (i.e., well tested) manner? Can't we have both timely and safe?