Re: Hey! 'lil help on Features?

> The release notes are in *technical* English, which may be
> perfectly clear to you, but it's not to 99% of the world. Actually, I'd
> say that our release notes are only really comprehensible to people who
> are already familiar with the PostgreSQL code. Which is fine; they are
> release notes.
>
> However, we need a document which is understandible to non-programmers
> who have never used PostgreSQL before.

Hmmm. Now *I'm* not being clear.

The release notes are meant to have strong technical detail around what
specific changes have been made to Postgres. This is necessary so that
our contributors and users who fiddle with PostgreSQL's guts (such as
the many people who maintain forks and tools) can know exactly what they
need to do to support the new release.

However, that kind of a document is not very useful for a reporter, a
blogger, an application developer, or a regular PostgreSQL user who is
evaluating PostgreSQL 8.4. The descriptions of changes are technical
and hard to understand, and the organization and categories of the
release notes are more based on history than designed for easy browsing.
Most of all, many of the descriptions in the release notes give no
clue what the feature is *for*.

Therefore, we need a second document designed to be easily understood by
the casual user or evaluator, which glosses over technical details.

This isn't new; we did it for 8.3:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/static/release-8-3.html
http://www.postgresql.org/about/press/features83

This document is very important because, like 8.3, 8.4 has far too many
features to be listed in the main press kit. And for many of our users,
they care more about one small fix than they do for the "major" features
of 8.4.

--
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
www.pgexperts.com