Re: Releasing in September

On Fri, Jan 22, 2016 at 10:43 AM, Alvaro Herrera
<alvherre(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
>> If we were to expand that to
>> cover reviewers, we would then be overburdinging that system and we
>> would probably end up removing all names from the release notes.
>
> To me, this reads just as a threat that "if you disturb the waters here
> I will just remove all names and you will all be the poorer for it."
> Please don't do that, it looks rude.

For my part, I am not sure the names in the release notes are actually
all that helpful. What does and does not get credited there and how
it gets credited is more random than I would like. And it's often
hard to draw the line as to who contributed enough to deserve credit
and who did not. In commit messages you can try to spell out the
details, but as Bruce says, there's no room for that in the release
notes. If a feature is credited as (Robert Haas, X, Y, Z) it's clear
that I'm the principle author, but it's unclear whether I did 40% of
the work or 90% of the work. If it's credited as (X, Robert Haas),
that could mean X came up with the idea and wrote a patch which I then
completely re-wrote from scratch using a different design and
committed; or it could mean X came with an idea that was basically
good and I wrote and debugged a 1000-line patch, and I rewrote 10% of
it for some reason before committing. So even today, it's pretty hard
to use the release notes as a way to measure depth of contribution.
The problem is worse for people most of whose work is reviewing and
committing rather than authoring, but if you put everybody's name on
everything they reviewed, that wouldn't fix it. Instead, you'd tend
to overvalue people who do a lot of shallow reviews relative to people
who do a few very deep ones. I think we just have to resign ourselves
to the fact that judging depth of contribution from the release notes,
or even the commit log, is going to be rather difficult; and that
different people will have different opinions about whose work is most
meritorious.

In other words, I fear that putting names in the release notes is just
politicizing a process that ought to be about presenting the
community's work in the best way possible. A new release ought to be
about putting the whole community forward in the best light.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company