Re: First draft of PG 17 release notes

Hi,

On 2024-05-18 11:13:54 -0400, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> Please see the email I just posted. There are three goals we have to
> adjust for:
>
> 1. short release notes so they are readable
> 2. giving people credit for performance improvements
> 3. showing people Postgres cares about performance
>
> I would like to achieve 2 & 3 without harming #1. My experience is if I
> am reading a long document, and I get to a section where I start to
> wonder, "Why should I care about this?", I start to skim the rest of
> the document.

I agree keeping things reasonably short is important. But I don't think you're
evenly applying it as a goal.

Just skimming the notes from the end, I see
- an 8 entries long pg_stat_statements section
- multiple entries about "Create custom wait events for ..."
- three entries about adding --all to {reindexdb,vacuumdb,clusterdb}.
- an entry about adding long options to pg_archivecleanup
- two entries about grantable maintenance rights, once via pg_maintain, once
per-table
- separate entries about pg_stat_reset_slru(), pg_stat_reset_shared("slru"),

If you're concerned about brevity, we can make things shorter without skipping
over most performance imporvements.

> I am particularly critical if I start to wonder, "Why
> does the author _think_ I should care about this?" becasue it feels like
> the author is writing for him/herself and not the audience.

FWIW, I think it's a good thing for somebody other than the author to have a
hand in writing a release notes entry for a change. The primary author(s) are
often too deep into some issue to have a good view of the right level of
detail and understandability.

Greetings,

Andres Freund