Thread: Do we ever edit release notes after release to add warnings about incompatibilities?

So last year in 10.5, 9.6.10, 9.5.9, 9.4.19, and 9.3.24 we had a
binary ABI break that caused pglogical and other logical decoding
plugins to break:

https://github.com/2ndQuadrant/pglogical/issues/183#issuecomment-417558313

This wasn't discovered until after the release so the release notes
don't highlight the risk. Someone upgrading past this release now
could diligently read all the release notes for all the versions they
care about and would never see anything warning that there was an
unintentional ABI break.

I wonder if we shouldn't be adding a note to those release notes after
the fact (and subsequent "However if you are upgrading from a version
earliers than...." notes in later releases). It would be quite a pain
I'm sure but I don't see any other way to get the information to
someone upgrading in the future. I suppose we could just add the note
to the current release notes on the theory that we only support
installing the current release.

-- 
greg

On Fri, Feb 21, 2020 at 10:15 PM Greg Stark <stark@mit.edu> wrote:
>
> So last year in 10.5, 9.6.10, 9.5.9, 9.4.19, and 9.3.24 we had a
> binary ABI break that caused pglogical and other logical decoding
> plugins to break:
>
> https://github.com/2ndQuadrant/pglogical/issues/183#issuecomment-417558313
>
> This wasn't discovered until after the release so the release notes
> don't highlight the risk. Someone upgrading past this release now
> could diligently read all the release notes for all the versions they
> care about and would never see anything warning that there was an
> unintentional ABI break.
>
> I wonder if we shouldn't be adding a note to those release notes after
> the fact (and subsequent "However if you are upgrading from a version
> earliers than...." notes in later releases). It would be quite a pain
> I'm sure but I don't see any other way to get the information to
> someone upgrading in the future. I suppose we could just add the note
> to the current release notes on the theory that we only support
> installing the current release.
>

I definitely think we should. People will be looking at the release
notes for many years to come... And people will be installing the old
versions.

I think the right thing to do is to add them in the same place as they
would've been added if we had noticed the thing at the right time. We
shouldn't duplicate it across every notes since then, but it should be
back-patched into those.

//Magnus