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

OK, I will work it.

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Simon Riggs wrote:
> 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
> 
> 
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--  Bruce Momjian   bruce@momjian.us EnterpriseDB    http://www.enterprisedb.com
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