Re: Release notes

Tom Lane wrote:
> ISTR that we had patch-merging problems too, because any patch
> submitters who took it seriously were trying to patch the same chunk
> of release.sgml.

That could be annoying, yes. I'm not sure how serious a problem it would
be in practice -- we could always adopt workarounds like allowing
release note additions anywhere within a section, rather than only at
the end. It might actually be better to cluster related changes within a
given section of the release notes, anyway.

> I tend to agree with Bruce that it's more efficient to go through the
> CVS logs once than to try to do the work incrementally.

I think the amount of total work required is probably pretty similar,
but incremental updates have several advantages. The work required is
distributed among many people, which reduces the "bus factor" of the
process. Incremental updates would also remove a significant task from
the beta process, because most of the work would be done during the
development cycle. As discussed earlier[1], I think the resulting
release notes would also be more comprehensive and discuss issues in
more depth, because they would be written while the details of the
change are fresh in the developer's mind.

> We should encourage people to write commit messages that are
> sufficient for the release notes, but folding the text into
> release.sgml immediately doesn't seem all that important.

Adding the text to release.sgml immediately would also make it more
accessible to users, which I think would clearly be a Good Thing.

-Neil

[1] http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2006-09/msg00615.php