Re: Alpha Releases: Docs?

On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 1:19 PM, Peter Eisentraut<peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net> wrote:
> On Tuesday 04 August 2009 18:52:06 Robert Haas wrote:
>> I'm willing to help if these are "8.5 release notes in process".  I'm
>> not willing to help if they are "alpha release notes that will be
>> thrown away afterwards".  Which is it?
>
> I was working on the latter assumption.
>
> I have some reservations about the former approach.  It would basically commit
> us right now to having a consistent set of volunteers available every two
> months within specific 1-2 day spans.  Which is the sort of thing I wanted to
> avoid.  But if we have that commitment, then go for it.

Yeah, the timing of the alpha releases could make this tricky. I'm
not sure if there's a way to work around that, or if we should just
give up and keep doing it the way that we have in the past.

I would like to think that the timing wouldn't need to be quite as
tight as what you are supposing. For example, is it really too early
to start working on the release notes for alpha1 now, or say at the
end of the week? If work were started on 8/7, there would still be 8
days left before official end-of-CommitFest, and presumably the
release of alpha wouldn't be until a few days after that, yet we'd
have a pretty good idea what was going to be in there.

Also, to be quite frank, I don't care that much about alpha releases.
What I care about is production releases. Helping with the release
notes for alpha is a means to an end. So it seems to me that, if
necessary, we could do something quick-and-dirty to get out the door,
and then we can work on patching them up over time. So the release
notes for features added in the latest alpha might be a little rougher
than the ones for earlier alphas (but maybe still better than, here's
the CVS log, have fun).

What I would like to avoid is a situation where we're basically ready
to go with beta and Bruce says, "Hold on, everybody, it's going to
take another two weeks while I plow through 600 commit messages." I
have a theory that that work can be spread out and much of it done in
advance and not necessarily by Bruce. However, that theory has yet to
be tested, and the committers (principally Tom and Bruce) have to be
open to it for it to have any chance of success.

...Robert