Re: Release Note Changes

Bruce Momjian wrote:
> Stefan Kaltenbrunner wrote:
>> Bruce Momjian wrote:
>>> Stefan Kaltenbrunner wrote:
>>>>> Let me give you the criteria I use for the release notes. The release
>>>>> notes try to document all changes visible to the average user in a way
>>>>> that is understandable to the average user.
>>>> hmm I'm not so sure about that - there are a number of changes to psql
>>>> that are not mentioned for example - like the addition of various new
>>>> backslashcommands (\dF, \dFp, \dFt ,...) as part of the main tsearch2
>>>> commit or a number of tab-complete improvements/additions (for tsearch
>>>> as well as some other stuff).
>>> Yea, but when you say you are adding tsearch there is the assumption
>>> that psql and pg_dump and tab completion will be updated to reflect
>>> that.
>> hmm well - tab.complete support was not done for a number of new
>> SQL-level stuff with the main commits in the last few releases and was
>> mostly added by different developers (like me) either in the same
>> release cycle or even later.
>> Anyway this "implicitly included in the main commit" adds a few
>> interesting gotchas like having a "Build Options" section that has stuff
>> like "--enable-profiling" and "--with-system-tzdata" but
>> "--with-ossp-uuid" is in the contrib section and "--with-libxml" is
>> missing (mostly because implicitly assumed as part of SQL/XML) as is
>> "--with-gssapi"(part of the GSSAPI feature?) and "--with-libxslt (no idea ?)
>
> These are new user-visible flags, not something like tab support which
> you just kind of expect to work for every SQL command, and if it doesn't,
> it is a bug.

ok but to summarize that again - we have the following new
configure/buildlevel flags in 8.3 and the place their are mentioned:

--enable-profiling - "Build Options"
--with-system-tzdata - "Build Options"
--with-libxml - not mentioned
--with-gssapi - not mentioned
--with-ossp-uuid - "Contrib"
--with-libxslt - not mentioned(which should probably be fixed)

So we have at least 6 important user visible changes in our build-system
but we only dokument(in the release notes all are in the docs) two in
the "Build Options" section and one in another which seems kinda
arbitrary ...

All this seems to actually beg the question of "what is the intended use
for our release notes". It has become clear that it is not intended to
be a complete listing of changes done to the code but what is the
intended use in the current form?

Stefan