Re: First draft of PG 17 release notes

On Tue, May 21, 2024 at 02:26:15PM -0400, Melanie Plageman wrote:
> In Postgres development, we break larger projects into smaller ones
> and then those smaller projects into multiple individual commits. Each
> commit needs to stand alone and each subproject needs to have a
> defensible benefit. One thing that is harder with performance-related
> work than non-performance feature work is that there isn't always a
> final "turn it on" commit. For example, let's say you are adding a new
> view that tracks new stats of some kind. You do a bunch of refactoring
> and small subprojects to make it possible to add the view. Then the
> final commit that actually creates the view has obvious user value to
> whoever is reading the log. For performance features, it doesn't
> always work like this.
>
> For the vacuum WAL volume reduction, there were a bunch of smaller
> projects throughout the last development year that I worked on that
> were committed by different people and with different individual
> benefits. Some changes caused vacuum to do less visibility checks (so
> less CPU usage), some changed WAL format in a way that saves some
> space, and some, like the commit you mention, make vacuum emit less
> WAL. That commit by itself doesn't contain all of the user benefits of
> the whole project. I couldn't think of a good place to list all of the
> commits together that were part of the same project. Perhaps you could
> argue that they were not in fact part of the same project and instead
> were just small individual changes -- none of which are individually
> worth including in the release notes.

I try and group them, but I am sure imperfectly. It is very true that
infrastucture changes that enable later commits are often missed.

--
Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> https://momjian.us
EDB https://enterprisedb.com

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