Re: Alpha Releases: Docs?

On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 10:48 AM, Tom Lane<tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> Peter Eisentraut <peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net> writes:
>> On Monday 03 August 2009 23:13:27 Alvaro Herrera wrote:
>>> Are we going to ship ChangeLog files or some such, giving that we're not
>>> going to have release notes?
>
>> There will still be release notes.  They might not be as polished as the final
>> ones, but there will be a list of new things, at least.
>
> That would be great, but who's going to do them?

I think the question is "who are you going to allow to do them?". I
sort of get the impression that you and Bruce have a love-hate
relationship with the release notes. On the one hand, they're a huge
time sink. On the other hand, it feels like you're not quite ready to
turn them over to anyone else. I feel like there have been some
previous offers of help (including by me) that either weren't an offer
to do quite the right thing or the offer was made at the wrong stage
of the process. I believe you told me on one occasion that they had
to all be written by a single person so that they'd be consistent...
but then, even though Bruce did the initial draft of the release
notes, you did most of the updating as we got closer to release and
more things were committed, so apparently it wasn't that critical for
one person to do it all after all.

For alpha, I think a dump of the CVS commit logs is fine if there's
not a better option. That's what Peter originally proposed, and
there's no reason to change now. But I suspect that it might be
possible to find someone who would be willing to do more than that if
they were treated nicely. For example, if someone volunteers to help
with this now, will their work be thrown out and redone by you and
Bruce "the right way" when the actual release arrives? Or will we
just revise and extend that work throughout the release cycle?

If you want to be rid of this task, then help some other people to do
it and do it well. If you want to keep doing it yourself, then dump
the CVS logs into the alpha release notes and call it good.

...Robert