Most PHP releases in August!

Since PHP 3.0.18 (released October 2000) (no, php.net doesn't keep release records before that for some reason) 60 PHP releases have been made. August and May are the most common months for PHP releases, with 9 releases each.

PHP5.3.1 and PHP5.2.11 are in the works these days.. Judging by the August release "frenzy" I bet both will be out by the end of the month!

Other useless stats?

  • 26 PHP releases have been on Thursdays
  • 1 On Saturday
  • There have only been 2 releases in 2009 so far
  • 2004 had 10 releases
  • January, April and October have only had 3 releases (each)
  • There has never been a release on Sunday
  • The 89th, 121st, 122nd, 194th, 228th, 241st and the 349th day of the year have had 2 releases each
  • The 3rd day of the month is most likely to be a release day, with total of 6 releases
  • The 9th, 16th, 18th and 21st (of any month) have never been release days...
  • The 18th week of the year is most likely to have an release, whole 8 releases have been made in that week!

Want more?
php -r '
function fetch($arg) {
static $mirror = "http://no2.php.net/releases/index.php";
return unserialize(file_get_contents("$mirror?$arg"));
}
foreach(fetch("serialize=1") as $major => $unused) {
foreach(fetch("serialize=1&max=-1&version=$major") as $version => $data) {
echo $version, " - ", $data["date"], "\n";
$foo[date("l", strtotime($data["date"]))]++;
}
}
arsort($foo); print_r($foo);
'

Comments

  1. Daniel P. BrownAugust 10, 2009 at 12:24 PM

    It's really interesting when someone throws out some random metrics - particularly with solid evidence to back up the claims. Pretty neat to see that a staggering number of releases were on Thursday. If pressed, that wouldn't have been even one of the top three days of the week I'd have guessed for releases.

    ReplyDelete
  2. bjoriAugust 10, 2009 at 1:42 PM

    I vaguely recall a post from Andi to internals@ about "best practices for releases", although I can't seem to find the post in the archives..
    The post had some good points:
    - Never release over the weekend (sysadmins need the weekend off)
    - Never release on Mondays (sysadmins need the day to read over the weekend mail)
    - Tuesday is fine
    - Wednesday is bad, sysadmins need to deal with the Monday and Tuesday tasks
    - Thursdays are very good
    - Fridays are extremely bad, late Friday is totally forbidden: People just read their mail and waste time until they can grab a beer

    ReplyDelete
  3. bjoriAugust 10, 2009 at 1:47 PM

    Out of curiosity, which were the top#3 days you had in mind Parasane?

    ReplyDelete
  4. philip-olsonAugust 11, 2009 at 8:35 AM

    Interesting stats, now let's go old school and add PHP 3 to include/releases.inc ... paper/rock/scissors for who finds/adds it? :)

    ReplyDelete
  5. The EggmanAugust 11, 2009 at 10:23 AM

    It would be interesting to see how releases relate to phases of the moon and planetary alignment. A new specialty is born, Cyberastrology. A good statistician could probably relate them to some key financial indices or major sporting events.

    ReplyDelete

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