Re: Postgres mail list traffic over time

Tom Lane wrote:
> Ron Mayer <rm_pg(at)cheapcomplexdevices(dot)com> writes:
>> Joshua D. Drake wrote:
>>> Its because we eliminated the -patches mailing list.
>
>> That's part of it. I've added -patches to the graph at
>> http://0ape.com/postgres_mailinglist_size/ as well as
>> a graph of hackers+patches combined; and it still looks
>> like hackers+patches is quite high in the past 3 months.
>
> One of the reasons we got rid of -patches was the frequency of
> cross-posting to both -hackers and -patches. Are you double-counting
> cross-posted messages?

For the combined graph I just summed the output of:
HEAD http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/mbox/pgsql-hackers.2008-09.gz | grep Content-Length
HEAD http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/mbox/pgsql-patches.2008-09.gz | grep Content-Length

I didn't look to see if the downloadable mboxes had duplicate messages.

If people want the raw data, here's the script I used to get it.
============================================================================
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
%W{rubygems hpricot open-uri gruff}.each{|l| require l}
def chart(url)
h = Hpricot.parse(open(url){|f| f.read})
mboxes = (h / "//a").map{|x| x.attributes['href']}. select{|x| x=~/\.gz/}
mboxes.sort.each{|x|
y = `HEAD #{url}/#{x}` =~ /Content-Length: (\d+)/ && $1
puts "#{x} #{y}"
}
end
patches = chart('http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-patches')
general = chart('http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-general')
hackers = chart('http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers')
============================================================================

Perhaps some of the extra burden on the experienced hackers is
a larger volume of newer people trying to contribute that are needing
more handholding (and thus more re-posted updated patches, etc)?