Re: Alpha 1 for 9.2

On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 10:30 AM, Peter Eisentraut <peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net> wrote:
> On mån, 2011-09-12 at 10:00 -0400, Robert Haas wrote:
>> I certainly think there is value in pushing an alpha release after
>> CF4, and maybe even after CF3.
>
> Yes, that makes sense.  Although I was surprised to see that the
> download numbers dropped off significantly for the later alphas.

IIUC, alpha4 got the most, I guess because that was the first one that
was alleged to be feature-complete. alpha5 had the least, but that's
probably because it was just a bunch of bug fixes over alpha4, but not
enough to make the result beta-quality, thus less interesting. Also,
I think that may have been the one we forgot to announce.

>> 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,
>
> Writing the release notes is really the main part of the work.  Bundling
> the release takes 15 minutes, writing the announcement takes 15 minutes
> (copy and paste), writing the release notes takes about 2 days.

Yep. So perhaps the question is whether anyone's willing to do that work.

>> probably someone to arrange for the minimal amount of necessary PR
>> work (announcements, etc.), and (somewhat optionally) packagers.
>
> We've tried that in the past, and haven't had much impact.

I think we at least need to announce the releases. Packaging is
optional, but it's nice if people are willing to do it, and I would
assume most packagers have this fairly well automated.

--
Robert Haas
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