Re: Draft release notes complete

On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 9:12 AM, Peter Geoghegan <peter(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
> On 10 May 2012 13:45, Andrew Dunstan <andrew(at)dunslane(dot)net> wrote:
>> Right, but I think it would be good to identify them explicitly as reviewers
>> if we're going to include the names.
>
> +1. I think we should probably do more to credit reviewers. It's not
> uncommon for a reviewer to end up becoming a co-author, particularly
> if they're a committer, but it's a little misleading to add a reviewer
> after the feature description without qualifying that they are the
> reviewer.

Right. Plus Bruce has arbitrarily excluded committer-reviewers even
when they substantially revised the patch as part of that review, and
included non-committer-reviewers even when they did little more than
say "good idea, +1". There are patches on that list where I did A LOT
of work and am not credited, including some where other people did get
credited for much less work. I don't feel a crying need to be
credited on the maximum possible number of items, but it seems weird
to see one group of people credited for what may well have been an
hour's work while another group of people isn't credited even when
they did two or three days worth of work.

When we did the 9.1 release notes, reviewers weren't credited, and I
sort of assumed that policy would be the same this time around. I
also sort of assumed that the committer would be credited if the
commit message stated that they had done substantial further work on
the patch, but not if it said that they'd only done a little bit of
work or none. Honestly, I don't really care what the standard for
inclusion is, but it's so glaringly non-uniform right now that it
really makes no sense.

I think my own personal preference would be to remove all the reviewer
names from individual items and list only the people who contributed
significantly to the code, and then have a section at the bottom where
we credit all the reviewers without reference to specific patches. Or
maybe we should just remove all the names from the release notes, full
stop, since it's pretty clear that we're on the verge of having the
names take up more space than the items to which they refer.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
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