Re: Release Notes: Major Changes in 8.2 - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

On Wed, 2006-09-20 at 23:22 -0400, Bruce Momjian wrote:

> Usually the major items just jump out of the release list.  In this
> case, nothing really jumped out, and I felt if I listed sereral, it was
> going to look weak because they were not big things, so I figured I
> would just go with the "broad" list.

Look back at the 7.4 release notes as a comparison. I think 8.0 was such
a milestone release we tend to judge ourselves by that and maybe feel
like the pace has slackened. IMHO, it has accelerated. We hit the lower
hanging fruit first, so early features were major items; later items
seem smaller and less important by comparison, especially when completed
by a team rather than a few individuals.

I don't think it matters whether the new features originated as a single
patch or as a stream of smaller patches. The end result is a major
improvement in a specific area. Picking one area I'm more familiar with,
sort performance was increased over many patches by many people, but the
original objective of making a step-change in that area *has* been
achieved (even if there are some additional gains still to be had for
certain narrower use-cases).

The role of the "Major changes" section is to provide a summary for
administrators who need to understand what a new release will give them
and make a cost/benefit judgement. We want people to understand the good
work that has been done and that does involve some filtering and
summarization, and its possibly true that it is harder in this release
than others. 

We need a Major changes section: People don't read the detail: sysadmins
are too busy these days. If there are no major features listed, people
will assume there are none and say "oh its just a bug fix release". If
we aren't encouraging people to upgrade, why release at all? Maybe
people only upgrade every other release - if so, we'll get all of the
8.0 upgraders.

Improving scalability in 8.1 was great. Improving it again in 8.2 is
amazing and we should tell people, even if it sounds somewhat boring
because we did it last time as well. I think: again, wow, this software
is going places. Personally, I'll be ecstatic if we can do that again
for 8.3...

> Or perhaps we can do more broad-stroke list items, like monitoring or
> performance, as listed below.

Whether we like my list or not, I think such a grouped list should
exist. I'm mainly seeking to persuade you on that point and would be
comfortable even if you came up with a different grouped list.

Seeing a list of names after a topic emphasises the community
development process. In some cases, there was a stated objective and
that has been achieved. In other cases there was a community-driven move
in directions maybe we didn't predict. In the latter case, surely it is
the strength of open source that evolution works so well and really does
produce noticeably major changes. The changes in monitoring and tuning
tools is an excellent example: many smaller changes making a significant
improvement.

Please vote in favour of a Major Changes section.

--  Simon Riggs              EnterpriseDB   http://www.enterprisedb.com