Dave Beckett - Journalblog

Hacking the semantic linked data web

Releases = Tweets

I got tired of posting release announcements to my blog so I just emailed the announcements to the redland-dev list, tweeted a link to it from @dajobe and announced it on Freshmeat which a lot of places still pick up..

Here are the tweets for the 13 releases I didn’t blog since the start of 2011:

  • 3 Jan: Released Raptor RDF syntax library 2.0.0 at http://librdf.org/raptor/ only 10 years in the making :)
  • 12 Jan: Released Rasqal RDF Query Library 0.9.22: Raptor 2 only, ABI/API break, 16 new SPARQL Query 1.1 builtins and more http://bit.ly/fzb9xW #rdf
  • 27 Jan: Rasqal 0.9.23 RDF query library released with SPARQL update query structure fixes (for @theno23 and 4store ): http://bit.ly/gVDp57
  • 1 Feb: Released Redland librdf 1.0.13 C RDF API and Triplestores with Raptor 2 support + more http://bit.ly/hOr4HA
  • 22 Feb: Released Rasqal RDF Query Library 0.9.25 with many SPARQL 1.1 new things and fixes. RAND() and BIND() away! http://bit.ly/flFDH1
  • 20 Mar: Raptor RDF Syntax Library 2.0.1 released with minor fixes for N-Quads serialializer and internal librdfa parser http://bit.ly/fT3aPX
  • 26 Mar: Released my Flickcurl C API to Flickr 1.21 with some bug fixes and Raptor V2 support (optional) See http://bit.ly/f7QncO
  • 1 Jun: Released Raptor 2.0.3 RDF syntax library: a minor release adding raptor2.h header, Turtle / TRiG and ohter fixes. http://bit.ly/jHKaB8
  • 27 Jun: Rasqal RDF query library 0.9.26 released with better UNION execution, SPARQL 1.1 MD5, SHA* digests and more http://bit.ly/lI7lDW
  • 23 Jul: Released Redland librdf RDF API / triplestore C library 1.0.14: core code cleanups, bug fixes and a few new APIs. http://bit.ly/qqV1Rb
  • 25 Jul: Raptor RDF Syntax C library 2.0.4 released with YAJL V2, and latest curl support, SSL client certs, bug fixes and more http://bit.ly/oCIIDd

(yes 13; I didn’t tweet 2 of them: Rasqal 0.9.24 and Raptor 2.0.2)

You know it’s quite tricky to collapse months of changelogs (GIT history) into release notes, compress it further into a news summary of a few lines and even harder to compress that into less than 140 characters. It is way less if you include room for a link url and space for retweeting and sometimes need a hashtag for context.

So how do you measure a release? Let’s try!

Tarballs

Released tarball files from the Redland download site.

date package old
version		 new
version		 old
tarball size		 new
tarball size		 tarball
byte diff		 tarball
%diff
2011-01-03 raptor 1.4.21 2.0.0 1,651,843 1,635,566 -16,277 -0.99%
2011-01-12 rasqal 0.9.21 0.9.22 1,356,923 1,398,581 +41,658 3.07%
2011-01-27 rasqal 0.9.22 0.9.23 1,398,581 1,404,087 +5,506 0.39%
2011-01-30 rasqal 0.9.23 0.9.24 1,404,087 1,412,165 +8,078 0.58%
2011-02-01 redland 1.0.12 1.0.13 1,552,241 1,554,764 +2,523 0.16%
2011-02-22 rasqal 0.9.24 0.9.25 1,412,165 1,429,683 +17,518 1.24%
2011-03-20 raptor 2.0.0 2.0.1 1,635,566 1,637,928 +2,362 0.14%
2011-03-20 raptor 2.0.1 2.0.2 1,637,928 1,633,744 -4,184 -0.26%
2011-03-26 flickcurl 1.20 1.21 1,775,246 1,775,999 +753 0.04%
2011-06-01 raptor 2.0.2 2.0.3 1,633,744 1,652,679 +18,935 1.16%
2011-06-27 rasqal 0.9.25 0.9.26 1,429,683 1,451,819 +22,136 1.55%
2011-07-23 raptor 2.0.3 2.0.4 1,652,679 1,660,320 +7,641 0.46%
2011-07-25 redland 1.0.13 1.0.14 1,554,764 1,581,695 +26,931 1.73%
Barchart of %diffs between tarball releases. Noticeable differences are raptor 2.0.0 with a big negative change and rasqal 0.9.22 with largest increase.
Click image to embiggen

Releases that stand out here are Raptor 2.0.0 which was a major release with lots of changes and Rasqal 0.9.21; that changed a lot upwards and it was both an API break as well as lots of new functionality.

Sources

Taken from my GitHub repositories extracting the tagged releases, excluding ChangeLog* files, and running diffstat over the output of a recursive diff -uRN.

date package old
version		 new
version		 source
files
changed		 source
lines
inserted		 source
lines
deleted		 source
lines
net
2011-01-03 raptor 1.4.21 2.0.0 215 34,018 30,348 64,366
2011-01-12 rasqal 0.9.21 0.9.22 94 11,641 5,712 17,353
2011-01-27 rasqal 0.9.22 0.9.23 25 5,663 5,199 10,862
2011-01-30 rasqal 0.9.23 0.9.24 48 1,107 227 1,334
2011-02-01 redland 1.0.12 1.0.13 96 3,721 5,627 9,348
2011-02-22 rasqal 0.9.24 0.9.25 64 3,857 1,333 5,190
2011-03-20 raptor 2.0.0 2.0.1 42 6,163 5,833 11,996
2011-03-20 raptor 2.0.1 2.0.2 9 55 12 67
2011-03-26 flickcurl 1.20 1.21 19 737 308 1,045
2011-06-01 raptor 2.0.2 2.0.3 88 2,827 2,232 5,059
2011-06-27 rasqal 0.9.25 0.9.26 116 7,130 4,272 11,402
2011-07-23 raptor 2.0.3 2.0.4 33 808 103 911
2011-07-25 redland 1.0.13 1.0.14 75 3,681 5,477 9,158
Total 924 81,408 66,683 148,091
Barchart of number of source lines changed (insertions + deletions) in each release. Raptor 2.0.0 stands out as much larger than all the others, nearly combined.
Click image to embiggen

Again Raptor 2.0.0 stands out as changing a huge number of files and lines. Also you can see the mistake that was Raptor 2.0.1 being corrected the same day with Raptor 2.0.2 with a few changes. This didn’t seem to get tweeted. However also note that several of the Rasqal releases like 0.9.22 and 0.9.26 changed many files. The ‘source lines net’ column is the addition of the insert and deletes although some of those lines are the same.

Words

Words from the changelog, the release notes and the news post comparing the number of words in the rendered output.

date package old
version		 new
version		 changelog
words		 release
note
words		 changelog
to release
word ratio		 news
words		 changelog
to news
word ratio
2011-01-03 raptor 1.4.21 2.0.0 15,411 2,709 5.69 365 42.22
2011-01-12 rasqal 0.9.21 0.9.22 3,465 1,199 2.89 162 21.39
2011-01-27 rasqal 0.9.22 0.9.23 318 135 2.36 52 6.12
2011-01-30 rasqal 0.9.23 0.9.24 450 254 1.77 59 7.63
2011-02-01 redland 1.0.12 1.0.13 778 235 3.31 73 10.66
2011-02-22 rasqal 0.9.24 0.9.25 1,649 558 2.96 136 12.13
2011-03-20 raptor 2.0.0 2.0.1 247 76 3.25 50 4.94
2011-03-20 raptor 2.0.1 2.0.2 42 27 1.56 42 1.00
2011-03-26 flickcurl 1.20 1.21 119 - - 68 -
2011-06-01 raptor 2.0.2 2.0.3 872 266 3.28 28 31.14
2011-06-27 rasqal 0.9.25 0.9.26 4,410 970 4.55 96 45.94
2011-07-23 raptor 2.0.3 2.0.4 517 345 1.50 77 6.71
2011-07-25 redland 1.0.13 1.0.14 1,347 620 2.17 88 15.31
Total 29,625 7,394 1,296
Bar chart of the ratio of the number of words in the changelog to those in the release news. Rasqal 0.9.26 and Raptor 2.0.0 are the argest but the tiny Raptor 2.0.2 bug fix is also notable.
Click image to embiggen

So now we get to words. Yes, lots of words, most of them by me. Starting with the changelog which is a hand edited version of the SVN and later GIT changes was over 15K words for Raptor 2.0.0. And that gets boiled down lots into release notes, news and then a terse tweet. Since the changelog corresponds roughly to source changes but the news to user visible changes like APIs, you can see that the oddities are again Rasqal 0.9.26 where there were lots of changes but not so much news; it was mostly internal work.

Now I need to go summarise this blog post in a tweet: Releases = Tweets in 1156 words http://bit.ly/n88ZIQ

by Dave Beckett on August 15, 2011
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