Re: Release Note Changes - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Bruce Momjian
Subject Re: Release Note Changes
Date
Msg-id 200712071733.lB7HXT519881@momjian.us
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: Release Note Changes  (Simon Riggs <simon@2ndquadrant.com>)
Responses Re: Release Note Changes  (Simon Riggs <simon@2ndquadrant.com>)
List pgsql-hackers
Simon Riggs wrote:
> On Fri, 2007-11-30 at 09:49 +0000, Gregory Stark wrote:
> > "Simon Riggs" <simon@2ndquadrant.com> writes:
> > 
> > > If people understand there aren't 13 performance improvements there are
> > > at *least* 19+ that is a positive message to help people decide to
> > > upgrade. 
> > 
> > Frankly I think the release notes are already too long. 
> 
> So why do we have stuff in there that the users will never see?

Which release note items?

> We already have a release summary, so why summarise *some* of the detail
> as well, but not all of it???
> 
> I see no reason to diminish yours, Heikki's or my own contributions, all
> of which were in the area of performance, which people do care about.
> None of the ones I mentioned were trivial patches, nor were their
> effects small. 

I totally agree that we are unfair in how we give attribution in the
release notes.  There is no weight given to patch difficulty and people
who produce user-invisible changes are much less likely to be mentioned
in the release notes.

I don't see any way to fix this that would not harm the release notes
themselves.  As I mentioned in an earlier email the release notes are
designed to highlight user-visible changes in a user-understandable way.
The mentioning of people who wrote the patches is merely a side-effect
of that to give some credit, but it is a side-effect, not the main
reason we mention something in the release notes.

If people are concerned about the unfairness, and I understand that, the
best solution is not to add more items to the release notes to be more
fair, but to remove all names from release note items.

--  Bruce Momjian  <bruce@momjian.us>        http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB
http://postgres.enterprisedb.com
 + If your life is a hard drive, Christ can be your backup. +


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