Re: Detailed release notes

On Wed, Sep 18, 2024 at 10:16:48AM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Jelte Fennema-Nio <postgres(at)jeltef(dot)nl> writes:
> > On Wed, 18 Sept 2024 at 02:55, Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> wrote:
> >>> Also very clutter-y. I'm not convinced that any of this is a good
> >>> idea that will stand the test of time: I estimate that approximately
> >>> 0.01% of people who read the release notes will want these links.
>
> >> Yes, I think 0.01% is accurate.
>
> > I think that is a severe underestimation.
>
> I'm sure a very large fraction of the people commenting on this thread
> would like to have these links. But we are by no means representative
> of the average Postgres user.

I am confused how to proceed. I think Jian He did the work for PG 17
because it will help many users once PG 17 is released soon, and I wrote
a script to automate this so we can easily continue this going forward.

I agree with Tom that the PDF superscripts look odd. After researching
XML and XPath, I have applied the attached patch to all branches, which
supresses the section symbol and footnotes for PDF output.

We only get a few requests a year for more details on release note
items, and we tell them to look at the SGML source file to see the
commit hashes, so this just isn't a frequently-requested need.

On the flip side, this has been discussed for several years among active
community members, usually around major release time. As I remember,
the last idea was to do something with Javascript on mouse-over of an
item. However, that would involve parsing the SGML in Javascript, which
seems much more error-prone and harder to test than the Perl script I
wrote.

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

When a patient asks the doctor, "Am I going to die?", he means
"Am I going to die soon?"