Alpha 1 for 9.2

Devrim G���ND���Z wrote:

Is there a plan to wrap up 9.2 Alpha 1 before the next commitfest?

We talked about it on core and no one seems interested in doing the
packaging. :-(

--
Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> http://momjian.us
EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com

+ It's impossible for everything to be true. +

On Tue, 2011-09-06 at 10:06 -0400, Bruce Momjian wrote:

Devrim GNDZ wrote:

Is there a plan to wrap up 9.2 Alpha 1 before the next commitfest?

We talked about it on core and no one seems interested in doing the
packaging. :-(

Oh, what if noone will be interested in packaging until the last
commitfest?

We need people to start testing features, without having to use git or
such.
--
Devrim GÜNDÜZ
Principal Systems Engineer @ EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
PostgreSQL Danışmanı/Consultant, Red Hat Certified Engineer
Community: devrim~PostgreSQL.org, devrim.gunduz~linux.org.tr
http://www.gunduz.org Twitter: http://twitter.com/devrimgunduz

2011/9/6 Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us>:

Devrim GÜNDÜZ wrote:

Is there a plan to wrap up 9.2 Alpha 1 before the next commitfest?

We talked about it on core and no one seems interested in doing the
packaging.  :-(

Well I don't particularly mind pushing a tag and bundling it, but I
guess the question is whether we actually want to do alpha releases at
all. I assume that core's reluctance to do this stems from being
dubious about its value, which seems like something that we should
discuss more broadly.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company

Robert Haas wrote:

2011/9/6 Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us>:

Devrim G?ND?Z wrote:

Is there a plan to wrap up 9.2 Alpha 1 before the next commitfest?

We talked about it on core and no one seems interested in doing the
packaging. ?:-(

Well I don't particularly mind pushing a tag and bundling it, but I
guess the question is whether we actually want to do alpha releases at
all. I assume that core's reluctance to do this stems from being
dubious about its value, which seems like something that we should
discuss more broadly.

Yes, it has always been a time vs. value question. I am not sure how I
feel on the matter but I am away too often to help anyway.

--
Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> http://momjian.us
EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com

+ It's impossible for everything to be true. +

Yes, it has always been a time vs. value question. I am not sure how I
feel on the matter but I am away too often to help anyway.

I think the alphas have been extremely valuable for testing. And with
some of the stuff going into CF1 and CF2 for 9.2, we really need some
early testing.

Or, to put it another way: if we don't release an Alpha2, then we're
going to need to do a packaged alpha with Haas's performance patches anyway.

--
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
http://pgexperts.com

On tis, 2011-09-06 at 17:25 +0300, Devrim GÜNDÜZ wrote:

Oh, what if noone will be interested in packaging until the last
commitfest?

Then nothing will happen.

We need people to start testing features, without having to use git or
such.

You can download daily snapshot tarballs.

On tis, 2011-09-06 at 13:38 -0400, Robert Haas wrote:

2011/9/6 Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us>:

Devrim GÜNDÜZ wrote:

Is there a plan to wrap up 9.2 Alpha 1 before the next commitfest?

We talked about it on core and no one seems interested in doing the
packaging. :-(

Well I don't particularly mind pushing a tag and bundling it, but I
guess the question is whether we actually want to do alpha releases at
all. I assume that core's reluctance to do this stems from being
dubious about its value, which seems like something that we should
discuss more broadly.

One point, which was already raised last year around this time, was that
it does seem weird to have alphas for release N+1 while beta for release
N is still going on. This year the start of N+1 was even earlier than
last year.

On tis, 2011-09-06 at 11:41 -0700, Josh Berkus wrote:

I think the alphas have been extremely valuable for testing.

That's not my recollection. Obviously, it's hard to measure this one
way or the other, but I don't recall there being a lot of test reports
from people who are not already contributors and could have used some
other way to get the code.

That's not my recollection. Obviously, it's hard to measure this one
way or the other, but I don't recall there being a lot of test
reports
from people who are not already contributors and could have used some
other way to get the code.

Do we have download stats for the alphas? Dave?

--Josh

On 09/10/2011 02:52 PM, Peter Eisentraut wrote:

On tis, 2011-09-06 at 11:41 -0700, Josh Berkus wrote:

I think the alphas have been extremely valuable for testing.

That's not my recollection. Obviously, it's hard to measure this one
way or the other, but I don't recall there being a lot of test reports
from people who are not already contributors and could have used some
other way to get the code.

As a tester, I'll pull from git. I like a quick update from git pull.

When I'm playing with patches, its a simple:

git reset --hard
patch < ...

I can't speak for others, but I find no benefit from a packaged alpha release.

-Andy

On Saturday, September 10, 2011, Joshua Berkus <josh@agliodbs.com> wrote:

That's not my recollection. Obviously, it's hard to measure this one
way or the other, but I don't recall there being a lot of test
reports
from people who are not already contributors and could have used some
other way to get the code.

Do we have download stats for the alphas? Dave?

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.

--
Dave Page
Blog: http://pgsnake.blogspot.com
Twitter: @pgsnake

EnterpriseDB UK: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company

On Sat, Sep 10, 2011 at 22:52, Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@gmx.net> wrote:

but I don't recall there being a lot of test reports
from people who are not already contributors and could have used some
other way to get the code.

I, for one, do use alpha tarballs on my dev machines (when working on
apps that use PostgreSQL). It gives me a concrete schedule to update
them that's not too frequent and I can tell whether they need updating
just by glancing at the version string.

If I was using git, I'd probably have some machines lagging hopelessly
behind and always confused about which version is which.

I also maintain an Arch Linux community package for testing versions,
that has at least one other user:
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=31562

But it's probably not worth releasing alphas for us two alone. :)

Regards,
Marti

Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@gmx.net> writes:

On tis, 2011-09-06 at 11:41 -0700, Josh Berkus wrote:

I think the alphas have been extremely valuable for testing.

That's not my recollection. Obviously, it's hard to measure this one
way or the other, but I don't recall there being a lot of test reports
from people who are not already contributors and could have used some
other way to get the code.

Presumably the people an alpha release would serve are those who aren't
in a position to build the code from source; since those who are can use
a nightly snapshot or just build from a git pull. So the question is
how big an audience is interested in testing alpha-grade code but do not
have build infrastructure. I would agree that that's a small fraction
on the Unix side of the fence, but I'm a lot less convinced that there's
no market for it among Windows users.

Of course, this means that just building a source tarball marked
"alpha1" isn't real useful. If we're going to do alpha releases, we
have to have buy-in from packagers (or at least from the Windows
installer team) to do follow-on package wrapping.

Josh asked about what was the download count for the alpha installers.
I don't think that's a relevant statistic; the number of people willing
to test alphas is certainly going to be small. What matters is the
value of test reports we get back from them. I'm not sure that we have
that information; people may specify that they're testing alphaN, but
they tend not to say whether they got an installer or built it
themselves.

regards, tom lane

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.

The main value of the alphas is that our Windows users aren't going to do any testing which requires source code compile. But if they're not doing any testing anyway, then there's no real point.

There's PR value in doing the alphas, but not enough to justify the effort involved.

If we're not going to do regular alphas, I would push to do one special alpha release which includes all of the locking code improvements and similar features added to date.

On lör, 2011-09-10 at 23:29 +0300, Marti Raudsepp wrote:

I, for one, do use alpha tarballs on my dev machines (when working on
apps that use PostgreSQL). It gives me a concrete schedule to update
them that's not too frequent and I can tell whether they need updating
just by glancing at the version string.

If I was using git, I'd probably have some machines lagging hopelessly
behind and always confused about which version is which.

Well, that's another point. If you're doing constant testing, do we
really want you testing code that is several weeks old? If you
discovered an issue, the first response would most likely be, upgrade to
the latest state of development.

On lör, 2011-09-10 at 16:34 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:

Of course, this means that just building a source tarball marked
"alpha1" isn't real useful. If we're going to do alpha releases, we
have to have buy-in from packagers (or at least from the Windows
installer team) to do follow-on package wrapping.

Yeah, and we aimed for that initially, but it didn't happen. And
especially the Windows installers have the highest overhead of any of
the packaging efforts, so it's unclear how to get them on board
consistently.

On Tue, 2011-09-06 at 16:49 +0300, Devrim GÜNDÜZ wrote:

Is there a plan to wrap up 9.2 Alpha 1 before the next commitfest?

<...>

Ok, so if noone is willing to produce alpha's (which is sad), we need to
change the text in here:

http://www.postgresql.org/developer/alpha

--
Devrim GÜNDÜZ
Principal Systems Engineer @ EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
PostgreSQL Danışmanı/Consultant, Red Hat Certified Engineer
Community: devrim~PostgreSQL.org, devrim.gunduz~linux.org.tr
http://www.gunduz.org Twitter: http://twitter.com/devrimgunduz

On Sat, Sep 10, 2011 at 9:47 PM, Joshua Berkus <josh@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.

186_www=# select count(*) from clickthrus where path like
'%postgresql-9.1alpha1.tar.%' and ts >= '2009-09-01';
count
-------
1431
(1 row)

186_www=# select count(*) from clickthrus where path like
'%postgresql-9.1alpha2.tar.%' and ts >= '2009-09-01';
count
-------
1335
(1 row)

186_www=# select count(*) from clickthrus where path like
'%postgresql-9.1alpha3.tar.%' and ts >= '2009-09-01';
count
-------
1127
(1 row)

186_www=# select count(*) from clickthrus where path like
'%postgresql-9.1alpha4.tar.%' and ts >= '2009-09-01';
count
-------
2011
(1 row)

186_www=# select count(*) from clickthrus where path like
'%postgresql-9.1alpha5.tar.%' and ts >= '2009-09-01';
count
-------
929
(1 row)

and for comparison:

186_www=# select count(*) from clickthrus where path like
'%postgresql-9.0.3.tar.%' and ts >= '2009-09-01';
count
-------
26211
(1 row)

186_www=# select count(*) from clickthrus where path like
'%postgresql-9.0.4.tar.%' and ts >= '2009-09-01';
count
-------
34769
(1 row)

Note that these are only numbers from people who click through the
flags pages on the website. We don't have numbers for people who
download directly from the FTP site or a mirror.

--
Dave Page
Blog: http://pgsnake.blogspot.com
Twitter: @pgsnake

EnterpriseDB UK: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company

On 9/12/11 2:23 AM, Dave Page wrote:

Note that these are only numbers from people who click through the
flags pages on the website. We don't have numbers for people who
download directly from the FTP site or a mirror.

I'd say that 1200 downloads of each alpha is pretty significant. If
even 1/4 of those people actually do testing, then that's a lot more
than we had for 8.3. It's also a heck of a lot more than I'd expect.

Sure, it's 5% of an update versions' downloads. So what? We don't
expect most people do to alpha testing. But if *hundreds* of people are
doing alpha testing, we want them to keep doing it.

--
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
http://pgexperts.com