In summary, names on release note items potentially have the following
beneficial effects:
* Encouraging new developers/reviewers
* Encouraging long-established developers
* Showing appreciation to developers
* Assisting future employment for developers
* Helping developers get future funding
* Assigning responsibility for features
* Assigning blame for feature problems
* Showing Postgres's increased developer base
Many of these goals has already been mentioned. So the question is
which of these is important? If we emphasize all of them, I am afraid
the name list for each item will be too long to be acceptable.
How many names on a single item is ideal? The activity of reviewers and
their names on commit messages has greatly expanded the number of
potential names per item.
How much of a downside is having the names in the release notes? For
example, we decided that company names shouldn't be on release note
items, so there is a case where we decided names were more of a negative
than a positive. Are there other negatives? Do other project release
notes have developer names? How are these names perceived by our
general readers?
-- Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB
http://enterprisedb.com
+ It's impossible for everything to be true. +