Re: PostgreSQL 15 Beta 1 release announcement draft

On 5/24/22 12:57 AM, Jeff Janes wrote:
> On Sat, May 14, 2022 at 2:52 PM Jonathan S. Katz <jkatz(at)postgresql(dot)org
> <mailto:jkatz(at)postgresql(dot)org>> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> Attached is a draft of the release announcement for the PostgreSQL 15
> Beta 1 release. The goal of this announcement is to raise awareness
> around many of the new features appearing in PostgreSQL 15 and to
> encourage people to test. The success of the PostgreSQL 15 GA depends
> heavily on people testing during the Beta period!
>
>
> I have some belated feedback.  I was excited to try this on Windows (I
> don't have a build system for that) and so followed the first link in
> the message, to https://www.postgresql.org/download/
> <https://www.postgresql.org/download/>.  At first glance there is
> nothing about beta there, but there is a prominent Windows icon so I
> click on that.  And then to EDB, but there is no apparent way to
> download beta, just the released versions.  I poked around EDB a bit but
> didn't find anything promising, then backed out of all that poking
> around and eventually all the way back to /download, where I scrolled
> down and finally found the link to
> https://www.postgresql.org/download/snapshots/
> <https://www.postgresql.org/download/snapshots/> which tells me what I
> need to know.  But at this point I was more annoyed than excited.
>
> An invitation to download the beta should take me directly to the page
> relevant to doing that.  I shouldn't have to read the page backwards, or
> do a breadth-first traversal, to get to the right place efficiently.
> People will click on the first link which seems relevant, and "Windows"
> on the generic download page certainly seems relevant to Beta for
> Windows, until after you have scrolled down to find the beta/RC specific
> link instead.  (I now recall being annoyed by this in a prior year as
> well, I guess I have a bad memory for avoiding mistakes but a
> good memory for recalling them).  Also, the download page should
> probably say "binary packages and installers" where it currently
> says  "There are source code and binary packages of beta and release
> candidates", although I guess that is not about the announcement itself.
> Cheers,

Some of the community installers are outside the platform (e.g.
Windows/Mac) and the timing of the releases of this around the beta
cannot be fully accounted for in the announcement.

However, I can relay your feedback to the packagers of these installers,
and I suggest you do the same.

With regards to the additional feedback, we recently did some measured
experiments around changes to the flow of the download page that, first
and foremost, brought people to their desired installers for stable
versions. The results from those experiments showed an appropriate
uptick on all accounts (which should be in a thread on -www).

We could perhaps tidy up the downloads page to make downloading
Betas/RCs more clear, but that's a discussion for -www.

Thanks,

Jonathan