Re: PostgreSQL 15 Beta 1 release announcement draft

On Sat, May 14, 2022 at 2:52 PM Jonathan S. Katz <jkatz(at)postgresql(dot)org>
wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Attached is a draft of the release announcement for the PostgreSQL 15
> Beta 1 release. The goal of this announcement is to raise awareness
> around many of the new features appearing in PostgreSQL 15 and to
> encourage people to test. The success of the PostgreSQL 15 GA depends
> heavily on people testing during the Beta period!
>

I have some belated feedback. I was excited to try this on Windows (I
don't have a build system for that) and so followed the first link in the
message, to https://www.postgresql.org/download/. At first glance there is
nothing about beta there, but there is a prominent Windows icon so I
click on that. And then to EDB, but there is no apparent way to download
beta, just the released versions. I poked around EDB a bit but didn't find
anything promising, then backed out of all that poking around and
eventually all the way back to /download, where I scrolled down and finally
found the link to https://www.postgresql.org/download/snapshots/ which
tells me what I need to know. But at this point I was more annoyed than
excited.

An invitation to download the beta should take me directly to the page
relevant to doing that. I shouldn't have to read the page backwards, or do
a breadth-first traversal, to get to the right place efficiently. People
will click on the first link which seems relevant, and "Windows" on the
generic download page certainly seems relevant to Beta for Windows, until
after you have scrolled down to find the beta/RC specific link instead. (I
now recall being annoyed by this in a prior year as well, I guess I have a
bad memory for avoiding mistakes but a good memory for recalling them).
Also, the download page should probably say "binary packages and
installers" where it currently says "There are source code and binary
packages of beta and release candidates", although I guess that is not
about the announcement itself.

Cheers,

Jeff