Re: Draft release notes complete

On 05/10/2012 02:29 PM, Robert Haas wrote:
> On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 2:15 PM, Josh Berkus<josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> wrote:
>>>>> Then reviewers should be removed.
>>>> I disagree. We're trying to get more reviewers, and encourage them to
>>>> do more reviewing. Giving credit is a big part of that.
>>> Are you disagreeing with Bruce's premise, my logic, or the conclusion?
>> Hah, good point. I'm disagreeing with the conclusion that reviewers
>> should be removed, unless we're going to remove everyone *and* give them
>> credit elsewhere. Which I would also be in favor of, I'm just not able
>> to do the work right now.
> Well, the problem with the way it is right now is that we're giving
> similar amounts of credit for very different amounts of contribution,
> which IMHO is no good. I think that putting a "Credits" section at
> the bottom and listing contributors there would be a reasonable
> solution; I also think that crediting people on a web page or in some
> other place would be a fine solution. What we have right now manages
> to be both unfair and unreadable.
>

I don't really believe either of these. It's certainly not unreadable,
and it's largely fair, although there may be some room for improvement.
Moreover, until we have something better I'm strongly opposed to
removing what we currently do (or have done in the past.)

The important thing about the current mechanism is that it ties the
contributor's name to a feature in the only place where we currently
list features on a time basis. So if I (for example) want to put on my
resume that I contributed adding new values to an enum in the 9.1
release, there is a really easy way for someone to check that that's
true, without having to search commit logs, which aren't always
wonderfully reliable either. If you want a little finer granularity, let
me offer the following categories as a way of opening up discussion:

Author: contributed a significant portion of the code of a feature
(say, over 25%)
Contributor: made a significant contribution to the code (say 10% or
more?), but less than that of an author.
Reviewer: did a significant review of the code but not a significant
code contribution.

These are intended as broad guidelines, rather than something to be
nitpicked and litigated, but you should get the idea.

cheers

andrew