On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 5:23 AM, Dave Page <dp...@pgadmin.org> wrote: > On Sat, Sep 10, 2011 at 9:47 PM, Joshua Berkus <j...@agliodbs.com> wrote: >>> Download numbers for the installers were bordering on noise compared >>> to the GA builds last time I looked, double figures iirc. I don't >>> know about the tarballs offhand and can't check ATM. >> >> Can you check when you get a chance? I know that the DL numbers for the >> first alphas were very low, but I'm wondering about Alpha 3, 4 and 5. > > [ >1100 downloads for alphas1-3, >2000 downloads for alpha4, ~900 downloads > for alpha5 ]
Hmm, that seems pretty respectable, all things considered. Honestly, I'm not sure how to feel about this. As a practical matter, I suspect that the value of alphas early in the release cycle is limited. Most of the big ticket features that people are going to be interested in testing tend to arrive late in the release cycle. If you look at the 9.1 release notes, the first commit to implement any portion of a feature that made the "major features" list for the release was my commit to add SECURITY LABEL, which happened on September 27, 2010. As of the turn of the year, we had 2.5 of the 10 features that ultimately made that list in the tree. IMHO, we should be making a more concerted effort to get more of our major features done and committed sooner, but since we aren't, testing of early alphas seems likely to be a fairly unrewarding activity. Stability testing is likely going to be largely useless (because there will be lots more code churn just before feature freeze), and feature testing is going to be confined to the relatively limited amount of stuff that gets done and committed early. I certainly think there is value in pushing an alpha release after CF4, and maybe even after CF3. Whether or not it's worthwhile to do them for earlier CFs I'm less certain about, but there seem to be several people speaking up and saying that they like having alpha releases, and if the hold-up here is just that we need someone to tag and bundle, I'm certainly willing to sign on the dotted line for that much. We'd still need someone to write release notes, though, probably someone to arrange for the minimal amount of necessary PR work (announcements, etc.), and (somewhat optionally) packagers. -- Robert Haas EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
