Re: Release note bloat is getting out of hand

Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> writes:
> On 02/02/2015 05:39 PM, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
>> I share the sentiment that the release notes *seem* too big, but the
>> subsequent discussion shows that it's not clear why that's really a
>> problem. Exactly what problem are we trying to fix?

> At a rough count of lines, the release notes for unsupported versions
> are about 18% of documentation overall (47K out of 265K lines). So
> they're not insubstantial. Compared to the total size of the tarball,
> though ...

It would not make that much of a difference in tarball size, agreed.
It *would* make a difference in the build time and output size of the
SGML docs --- as I mentioned at the outset, the release notes currently
account for 25% of the SGML source linecount.

Now, that's probably still only marginally a problem, but my real
point is that this is not sustainable. The release notes are growing
faster than the rest of the docs. This isn't so obvious if you compare
adjacent release branches, but over a slightly longer timescale it is.
A quick "wc -l" in my current git checkouts gives

Release release-*.sgml all .sgml Percent

8.3 37770 204060 18.5
9.0 59318 250493 23.7
HEAD 85672 336874 25.4

We can stick our heads in the sand for awhile longer yet, but
eventually this is going to have to be dealt with.

regards, tom lane