Re: Release note bloat is getting out of hand

Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> writes:
> On 02/02/2015 07:54 AM, Robert Haas wrote:
>> The last 5 branches only takes us back to 9.0, which isn't very far.
>> I would want to have at least the 8.x branches in the SGML build, and
>> maybe the 7.x branches as well. I would be happy to drop anything
>> pre-7.x from the docs build and just let the people who care look at
>> the SGML. You seem to be assuming that nobody spends much time
>> looking at the release notes for older branches, but that is certainly
>> false in my own case.

> I was suggesting having a separate "historical release notes" tarball,
> actually. If that's in SGML, and can be built using our doc tools, we
> haven't lost anything and we've reduced the size of the distribution
> tarball.

That was pretty much my point as well. Sure, we can keep all the notes
online somewhere; that doesn't mean they have to be in the standard
distribution tarball, nor in the standard documentation build.

> One of the things I've been tinkering with for a while is a better
> searchable version of the release notes. The problem I keep running
> into is that it's very difficult to write an error-free importer from
> the present SGML file; there's just too much variation in how certain
> things are recorded, and SGML just isn't a database import format.

The existing release notes are not conveniently searchable, for sure;
they're not in a single file, and they don't show up on a single page
on the Web, and I've never seen a PDF-searching tool that didn't suck.
So I'm bemused by Robert's insistence that he wants that format to support
searches. As I said, I find it far more convenient to search the output
of "git log" and/or src/tools/git_changelog --- I keep text files of those
around for exactly that purpose.

regards, tom lane