Re: Release Note Changes

Simon Riggs wrote:
> On Fri, 2007-11-30 at 09:49 +0000, Gregory Stark wrote:
> > "Simon Riggs" <simon(at)2ndquadrant(dot)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(at)momjian(dot)us> http://momjian.us
EnterpriseDB http://postgres.enterprisedb.com

+ If your life is a hard drive, Christ can be your backup. +