Re: Release note bloat is getting out of hand

Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> On Sun, Feb 1, 2015 at 11:10 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>> I propose that we go over to a policy of keeping in HEAD only release
>> notes for actively maintained branches, and that each back branch should
>> retain notes only for branches that were actively maintained when it split
>> off from HEAD. This would keep about five years worth of history in
>> Appendix E, which should be a roughly stable amount of text.

> -1. I find it very useful to be able to go back through all the
> release notes using grep, and have done so on multiple occasions. It
> sounds like this policy would make that harder, and I don't see what
> we get out of of it. It doesn't bother me that the SGML documentation
> of the release notes is big; disk space is cheap.

Disk space isn't the only consideration here; if it were I'd not be
concerned about this. Processing time is an issue, and so is distribution
size, and so is the length of the manual if someone decides to print it
on dead trees. I also live in fear of the day that we hit some hard-to-
change internal limit in TeX.

Personally, what I grep when I'm looking for historical info is "git log"
output, which will certainly not be getting any shorter.

regards, tom lane