Re: Release note bloat is getting out of hand

On February 2, 2015 9:38:43 PM CET, Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>On Mon, Feb 2, 2015 at 3:11 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>> The existing release notes are not conveniently searchable, for sure;
>> they're not in a single file, and they don't show up on a single page
>> on the Web, and I've never seen a PDF-searching tool that didn't
>suck.
>> So I'm bemused by Robert's insistence that he wants that format to
>support
>> searches. As I said, I find it far more convenient to search the
>output
>> of "git log" and/or src/tools/git_changelog --- I keep text files of
>those
>> around for exactly that purpose.
>
>I normally search in one of two ways. Sometimes a grep the sgml;
>other times, I go to, say,
>http://www.postgresql.org/docs/devel/static/release-9-4.html and then
>edit the URL to take me back to 9.3, 9.2, 9.1, etc.

FWIW I the same. Git log is great if you want all detail. But often enough the more condensed format of the release notes is helpful. Say, a customer has problems after migrating to a new version. It's quite a bit faster to read the section about incompatibilities than travel through the git log.

There's a reason the release notes exist. Given that they're apparently useful, it doesn't seem strange that devs sometimes read them...

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