Re: Release note trimming: another modest proposal

"Jonathan S. Katz" <jkatz(at)postgresql(dot)org> writes:
> On 1/26/19 10:06 AM, Tom Lane wrote:
>> If I haven't heard objections, I'll see about making this happen
>> during the first week of Feb (after the CF closes, but before
>> it's time to do the February releases' notes).

> Thank you! I was hoping to take a crack at doing this, but I would not
> be able to do so in the above timeline. However, I should be able to review.

Attached is a diff showing what I'm thinking about, for HEAD; each
active back branch would get a similar change. I'd also "git rm"
now-unreferenced files in relevant branches, but that'd just bulk up
the diff so I've not shown it here.

It's not quite clear to me what the policy would be for removing
back-branch links from this list when old versions drop out of support.
Should we go back and remove them in surviving back branches, or just
change HEAD?

Note that this would change our workflow for release notes a bit,
in that real editing work would happen in the back branches, rather
than them just getting copies of text from HEAD. I don't see a big
problem there, but it's a bit different from how we've traditionally
done things.

Just for the record, this change causes the time to build HEAD's
HTML documentation to drop from ~120 sec to ~95 sec for me; the
size of the resulting html/ directory drops from 21MB to 15MB,
while the PDF output goes from 17MB to 12.2MB. I didn't try to
measure the impact on tarball size, but it should be noticeable.

regards, tom lane