I've been noticing that the information in the HISTORY file is regularly
incomplete, not understandable, and mostly useless except for "wow, look
what we've done" purposes.  When we get to a release a year from now
(*grin*) I'm sure the dynamic_library_path thing is going to end up under
"shared library fixes".

Wouldn't it be better if the author (or committer) of a user visible
change would himself add a snippet to the release notes?

The additional benefit would be that users that get intermediate
development sources would have an idea what's been going on in between.

-- 
Peter Eisentraut   peter_e@gmx.net   http://funkturm.homeip.net/~peter


Thu, 17 May 2001 22:21:44 +0200 (CEST)
Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@gmx.net>
Maintaining HISTORY
> I've been noticing that the information in the HISTORY file is regularly
> incomplete, not understandable, and mostly useless except for "wow, look
> what we've done" purposes.  When we get to a release a year from now
> (*grin*) I'm sure the dynamic_library_path thing is going to end up under
> "shared library fixes".

I am sure you are correct.

> Wouldn't it be better if the author (or committer) of a user visible
> change would himself add a snippet to the release notes?
> 
> The additional benefit would be that users that get intermediate
> development sources would have an idea what's been going on in between.

Sure, feel free to dive in an add stuff to HISTORY.  We usually have
~150 items listed for a major release, and I tend to concentrate on
user-visible changes.  Lots of optimizer and configuration stuff gets
shortened because it is more invisible to the user, though no less
important.

Marc has started to included the Changelog for each release, though that
will be a monster for any major release.  What I think would be ideal
would be to have the Changelog available as a web page, so you could see
by date the changes all the way back to 1.0.2.  We already have the
tools to generate the web content as part of our commit messages.

Also, feel free to go back in the HISTORY/release.sgml and clarify
anything in there.  I keep it brief so people can quickly look over the
changes we have made, but clearly I don't understand all of them myself.
If people want it more verbose, we can do that, or if they want a
secondary location for more verbose information, we can do that too.

-- 
  Bruce Momjian                        |  http://candle.pha.pa.us
  pgman@candle.pha.pa.us               |  (610) 853-3000
  +  If your life is a hard drive,     |  830 Blythe Avenue
  +  Christ can be your backup.        |  Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania 19026

Thu, 17 May 2001 16:37:17 -0400 (EDT)
Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us>
Re: Maintaining HISTORY