On 10/01/2015 07:55 AM, Tom Lane wrote: > Playing devil's advocate ... would this really do much other than bloat > the release notes? The entire assumption of this thread is that people > don't, or don't want to, use the release notes to find out what got fixed; > they'd rather search a tracker.
It's not a question of "rather", it's a question of how searchable the release notes are, which is "not really at all". Yes, you can scan the release notes for the latest update, but consider users who have an issue and are running 9.2.7. Reasonably enough, they want to know that their issue is fixed in 9.2.13 (or in 9.4 if it turns out to be a feature, not a bug) before they ask their boss for a downtime. Figuring that out now is really hard. I tried to tackle this three or four years ago, by writing a tool which would slurp the release notes and put them into a full-text search database. This turned out to be very hard to do; our formatting for the release notes makes it very difficult for an automated import program to interpret (SGML doesn't help), especially on point releases to old versions. It also turned out that the resulting database was useful mostly to me, because you had to figure out what terms to search on based on the bug report in front of you. As a result, it never went online. So today, the only time the release notes are useful for a "is this issue fixed or not" is when a release note message mentions the specific error message the user is getting, which is a minority of the time. So in addition to what Haas mentions, I think we want to be able to link the release notes to the original issues for our hypothetical bug tracker. -- Josh Berkus PostgreSQL Experts Inc. http://pgexperts.com -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers