Re: Release note bloat is getting out of hand

On 2/3/15 12:32 AM, Tom Lane wrote:
> It would not make that much of a difference in tarball size, agreed.
> It *would* make a difference in the build time and output size of the
> SGML docs --- as I mentioned at the outset, the release notes currently
> account for 25% of the SGML source linecount.

We could make the release notes a separate top-level document. Then it
could be built in parallel with the documentation. There are only two
links from the rest of the docs into the release notes, so there
wouldn't be much harm.

Doing this would also solve an unrelated issue: Sometimes, when I run a
spell or markup checker over the documentation, the old release notes
tend to get flagged for many things, because we don't edit those after
the release. Separating the actively maintained documentation from the
it-is-what-it-is release notes would make that distinction clearer.

The web site would need to be reorganized slightly, but I can imagine
that in the long run this could also be a win.

Note also that you only need to present the release notes from the
latest stable release branch on the web site, as opposed to
documentation for each branch.