Re: 9.5 release notes

On Thu, Jun 11, 2015 at 1:15 PM, Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> wrote:
> I have committed the first draft of the 9.5 release notes. You can view
> the output here:
>
> http://momjian.us/pgsql_docs/release-9-5.html
>
> and it will eventually appear here:
>
> http://www.postgresql.org/docs/devel/static/release.html
>
> I am ready to make suggested adjustments, though I am traveling for
> conferences for the next ten days so there might a delay in my replies.

Here are some review comments:
+ <para>
+ RETURN WHERE
+ </para>
What is that?

+ <para>
+ WHAT IS A STATISTICS SNAPSHOT?
+ </para>
+ </listitem>
It defines the last time when the global statistics file of pgstat has
been written. Perhaps documentation should be made clearer.

+ <para>
+ The remote snapshot must have been exported by
+ <function>pg_export_snapshot()</> or been defined as a
+ logical replication slot. This can be used by parallel
+ <application>pg_dump</> to use a consistent snapshot across
+ <application>pg_dump</> processes.
+ </para>
Perhaps "or been defined when creating a logical replication slot
through a replication connection".

+ <listitem>
+ <para>
+ Simplify <acronym>WAL</> record format (Heikki Linnakangas)
+ </para>
+
+ <para>
+ This allows external tools to more easily process <acronym>WAL</>
+ files.
+ </para>
+ </listitem>
More precision could be brought here. What the new format allows is
actually to track more easily what are the blocks modified for
relations, something possible without having the knowledge of the
record type directly.

+ <para>
+ This is particularly helpful for warm standbys.
+ </para>
"for warm standbys to control the timing at which WAL segment files
are retrieved from a WAL archive."

I think that the following items should be added as well:
- Improvement of file version information for Windows builds (Noah
Misch, Michael Paquier), commit ee9569e. The file version information
was missing for a set of contrib modules as well as a handful of
libraries and binaries (like conversion_procs, zic, pg_regress, etc.).
This item should mention that all the binaries and libraries produced
by a Windows build now contain file version information. This could be
merged as well with this item as both are related:
+ <para>
+ Add icons to all <productname>MSVC</>-built binaries (Noah Misch)
+ </para>
- Move pg_lzcompress and pg_lzdecompress to libpqcommon, commit
40bede54. This was some legwork for wal_compression but external
binary tools can take advantage of using it now more freely. Those
APIs have been reworked as well to be more generic, somewhat similarly
to the interface lz4 exposes to the user.
- Addition of palloc_extended (8c8a886) to give module developers a
fallback plan instead of OOM ERROR that palloc throws mandatorily.
MemoryContextAllocExtended() can be used on another memory context
than the current one similarly (bd4e2fd9). Feel free to discard this
one if this is not appropriate in the release notes.
Regards,
--
Michael