Thread: 9.5 feature count

I have run a script to count the number of "<listitem>" items in the
major release notes of each major version of Postgres back to 7.4:
7.4    2808.0    2388.1    1878.2    2308.3    2378.4    3309.0    2529.1    2139.2    2509.3    1879.4    2179.5
176

The 9.5 number will only change a little by 9.5 final.

--  Bruce Momjian  <bruce@momjian.us>        http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB
http://enterprisedb.com
 + Everyone has their own god. +

On Sun, Jun 14, 2015 at 02:12:16PM -0400, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> I have run a script to count the number of "<listitem>" items in the
> major release notes of each major version of Postgres back to 7.4:
> 
>     7.4    280
>     8.0    238
>     8.1    187
>     8.2    230
>     8.3    237
>     8.4    330
>     9.0    252
>     9.1    213
>     9.2    250
>     9.3    187
>     9.4    217
>     9.5    176
> 
> The 9.5 number will only change a little by 9.5 final.

FYI, all final releases have 5-10 listed major items which are repeats
of other items, so the final 9.5 count will be slightly higher.

--  Bruce Momjian  <bruce@momjian.us>        http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB
http://enterprisedb.com
 + Everyone has their own god. +

Bruce Momjian wrote:
> I have run a script to count the number of "<listitem>" items in the
> major release notes of each major version of Postgres back to 7.4:
> 
>     7.4    280
>     8.0    238
>     8.1    187
>     8.2    230
>     8.3    237
>     8.4    330
>     9.0    252
>     9.1    213
>     9.2    250
>     9.3    187
>     9.4    217
>     9.5    176
> 
> The 9.5 number will only change a little by 9.5 final.

I think doing this kind of "analysis" can lead to bad incentives; should
we split two items that are unrelated but touch similarly-sounding parts
of the code, should we merge items that are actually pretty much the
same thing?  It's either pointless, because people in-the-know actually
realizes that it doesn't actually mean anything, or confusing because
people think that some releases are bigger than others because they have
"more features".

Maybe there's a reasonable way to measure releases (my 8.0 is bigger
than your 9.1!), but I don't think this is it.

-- 
Álvaro Herrera                http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services

On Fri, Jun 26, 2015 at 11:09 AM, Alvaro Herrera
<alvherre@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
> Maybe there's a reasonable way to measure releases (my 8.0 is bigger
> than your 9.1!), but I don't think this is it.


I agree with the sentiment, but I don't think that anyone actually
thinks of it that way. Most people tend to think of a release in terms
of the big, exciting features, or the smaller features that happened
to scratch their particular itch.

-- 
Peter Geoghegan

On Fri, Jun 26, 2015 at 11:13:19AM -0700, Peter Geoghegan wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 26, 2015 at 11:09 AM, Alvaro Herrera
> <alvherre@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
> > Maybe there's a reasonable way to measure releases (my 8.0 is bigger
> > than your 9.1!), but I don't think this is it.
> 
> 
> I agree with the sentiment, but I don't think that anyone actually
> thinks of it that way. Most people tend to think of a release in terms
> of the big, exciting features, or the smaller features that happened
> to scratch their particular itch.

I agree.  I think the count tells us how focused we are in working on a
few big things or many small things, e.g. when we don't have many big
features in a major release, the count tends to be high as we clean up
previously-released big features.

--  Bruce Momjian  <bruce@momjian.us>        http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB
http://enterprisedb.com
 + Everyone has their own god. +