> 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?
The two paragraphs above show the main problem.
Who gets listed on each item is a matter of some contention. For
example, if Robert Haas reviews a patch, and makes substantial
suggesitons and fixes to the patch, should he be listed on it as well?
If so, how much work is required for someone to be listed if they're not
the original author? What if we merge two patches, but take 90% of
Patch A and only 10% of Patch B? etc.
We can decide these things on a case-by-case basis, but it makes
preparing the release notes a LOT more effort.
Let's see what other OSS projects do:
HTTPD: lists people in the release notes:
http://www.apache.org/dist/httpd/CHANGES_2.4.2
Linux, as far as I can tell, does not do Release Notes as such.
FreeBSD does not have people's names in release notes, but does put
links to the relevant commitlog:
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/8.2R/relnotes.html
Drizzle puts author's names in the release notes:
http://blog.drizzle.org/category/release/
LibreOffice has author names and companies in the release notes:
http://www.libreoffice.org/download/3-4-new-features-and-fixes/
git does *not* put author names in the release notes:
https://raw.github.com/gitster/git/master/Documentation/RelNotes/1.7.9.txt
I don't know if any of the above are putting committer, or reviewer
names in the release notes, but given that most items have a single
name, I doubt it.
So what common practice tells us is inconclusive ...
--
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
http://pgexperts.com