Re: 9.5 release notes

On Thu, Aug  6, 2015 at 03:32:43PM -0700, Peter Geoghegan wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 6, 2015 at 3:06 PM, Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> wrote:
> >> Below performance improvement in the "General Performance" category is missing:
> >>
> >>     Reduce btree scan overhead for < and > strategies
> >>
> >>     For <, <=, > and >= strategies, mark the first scan key
> >>     as already matched if scanning in an appropriate direction.
> >>     If index tuple contains no nulls we can skip the first
> >>     re-check for each tuple.
> >
> > While this is a nice 9.5 feature, it really is "btree is faster", and
> > users usually don't need to know that, unless the change is massive that
> > they would change their use of the feature.
> 
> I think that Rajeev is entitled to be credited for his work,
> especially as a less experienced contributor.
> 
> Sure, users are not likely to care too much about incremental progress
> like this (however, I would be willing to bet that more users care
> about this item than about existing items like "Make initdb issue a
> warning about placing the data directory at the top of a file system
> mount point"). IMV it is the role of the release notes to document
> what went into a release fairly methodically. I often look at release
> notes to determine what might have gone wrong in a part of the code
> that I'm less familiar with, for example.
> 
> Users mostly only specifically care about one or two big ticket items,
> and in any case are not likely to learn about them from the release
> notes. The release notes seem shorter than previous years, and I don't
> think it's because 9.5 is a smaller release.

I am using the same criteria I have always used.  If you would like it
changed, we need to discuss it at a macro level, not for individual
cases where we feel someone didn't get enough _credit_.

And, I will restate this again, the release note are not for _us_, or
for _credit_ --- they are for our general users.  If you would like that
changed, you need to make a case for that change.

--  Bruce Momjian  <bruce@momjian.us>        http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB
http://enterprisedb.com
 + Everyone has their own god. +