Bruce Momjian wrote:
> FYI, the fact that feature authors appear in the release notes is an
> artifact of how we track who wrote which stuff, and is not designed for
> rewarding, though it has that effect.
I think you can claim this all you want, but I'd be surprised if anyone
actually believed it. You're saying that we do this so that we can
properly attribute code to developers so that we can pester the right
guy when things go wrong; but in reality when we investigate a bug we
never look at the release notes; what we do is look at the Git logs,
which already contain this information.
To the public at large I'm pretty sure having the names there is a
reward for having developed stuff, not a blame sign. Do real users go
back to 9.3 to see that "oh this Alverro dude wrote multixacts which had
so many bugs, we should really hang him by the bollocks"? I don't think
so. People like Robert, Andres, Noah are more likely to want me hung
because they worked so hard to get the bugs fixed.
> If we were to expand that to
> cover reviewers, we would then be overburdinging that system and we
> would probably end up removing all names from the release notes.
To me, this reads just as a threat that "if you disturb the waters here
I will just remove all names and you will all be the poorer for it."
Please don't do that, it looks rude.
I think it is a disservice to the project to deny the reviewers the bit
of coolness factor derived from having their names in the release notes
-- or maybe just *somewhere*. If you want to remove the developer names
from the release notes to avoid bloating them, perhaps what we can do is
put names of authors and reviewers in a page in the website (probably
not the wiki, though, because it's easy to vandalize that and many
people may have concerns regarding the legitimacy of anyone listed
there.)
--
Álvaro Herrera http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services
