Re: Release note trimming: another modest proposal

On Mon, Aug 6, 2018 at 9:37 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:

> "Jonathan S. Katz" <jkatz(at)postgresql(dot)org> writes:
> >> On Aug 6, 2018, at 3:27 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> >> Actually, a concrete reason why that might not be good is that it
> results
> >> in having a single point of failure: once we remove branch N's relnotes
> >> from the active branches, the only copy of that data is the one in the
> >> archive table the docload script is filling. Given, say, a bug in the
> >> docload script that causes it to overwrite the wrong table entries,
> >> can we recover?
>
> > Well, the release notes are still in the git history as well as the
> tarballs.
> > One could always pull an older tarball of PostgreSQL with the full
> > release.sgml and load from there.
>
> True ... as long as those older tarballs represent data that our current
> workflow can process. For instance, if we did another documentation
> format change (from XML to something else), the older tarballs would
> perhaps no longer be useful for this purpose.
>
> On the other hand, it's hard to believe that we'd make such a conversion
> without tools to help. So probably if the situation came up, we could
> cobble together something that would allow ingesting the old format.
>

The current process to load the docs is basically "extract the HTML files
from the tarballs". We run this against the tarballs of any "latest minor
release".

So yes, as long as we are OK with only loading release notes the same way
we do docs, which is from tarballs, then I really don't think this part
will be a problem, and we don't need to do anything about the old files
either. But it's not like we're going to be *editing* old release notes in
branches that are out of support. We'll be trimming them out of the master
branch, but the master branch is not used to load the old docs, only the
developer docs.

--
Magnus Hagander
Me: https://www.hagander.net/ <http://www.hagander.net/>
Work: https://www.redpill-linpro.com/ <http://www.redpill-linpro.com/>