Re: Alpha 1 for 9.2

On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 8:39 PM, Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> wrote:
> Peter Eisentraut wrote:
>> On m?n, 2011-09-12 at 09:43 -0700, Josh Berkus wrote:
>> > > Writing the release notes is really the main part of the work.  Bundling
>> > > the release takes 15 minutes, writing the announcement takes 15 minutes
>> > > (copy and paste), writing the release notes takes about 2 days.
>> >
>> > Yeah, but this shaved a lot of effort/delay off doing the final release
>> > notes.
>>
>> It did?  AFAICT, the final release notes were created from scratch and
>> the alpha release notes deleted.
>
> Yes, that is what happened.  I did the 9.1 release notes from scratch,
> and Robert Haas looked over the alpha notes and mine and found mine more
> complete.  He did move some wording from the alpha releases into the
> final release notes.  I think Robert has the best perspective on this
> issue.

I don't have much of an opinion on this, honestly.  I think that
whoever did the alpha release notes tried to hit the highlights,
whereas Bruce went for something more in-depth.  You could make an
argument for either approach.

I think if the alpha release notes were done with a clear idea in mind
of producing something like what Bruce turned out, it wouldn't be
necessary for Bruce to do it over again.  The problem is that once you
start leaving things out, it's very difficult to figure out exactly
what got left out without redoing the whole process ab initio.  On the
flip side, I cross-referenced the alpha release notes with Bruce's,
and found a few things that Bruce had mysteriously omitted or to which
he had given short shrift.  So there is potentially at least a little
bit of value in doing the process twice - it helps you catch things
that may have gotten dropped.

Having done some work on this, I do NOT believe the previously-offered
contention that this work can't be done incrementally.  I think it
could.  After each CF, Bruce, or someone else, could go through all
the commits and produce a list of items.  As the release wore on, it
might be necessary to subdivide some of the categories or recategorize
things, but that I don't think it would be unmanageable.  The whole
process seems reasonably straightforward, just somewhat
time-consuming.  The main challenge seems to be making sure you don't
lose things.

--
Robert Haas
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