Re: [HACKERS] Release date and docs

Thomas Lockhart <lockhart@alumni.caltech.edu> writes:
> An alternative which I would support but am not yet as satisfied with
> would be to decouple the hardcopy docs from the release package.

Totally apart from any schedule considerations, I think it would be good
if the derived forms of the docs (the .ps files and tarred .html files
in pgsql/doc) were decoupled from the source distribution.  In
particular, remove those files from the CVS archives and distribute
them as a separate tarball rather than as part of the source tarballs.

This'd be good on general principles (derived files should not be in
CVS) and it'd also reduce the size of snapshot tarballs by a couple of
meg, which is a useful savings.  Since the derived docs are always a
version behind during the runup to a new release, I don't see much
value in forcing people to download 'em.

A further improvement, which oughta be pretty easy if the doc prep tools
are installed at hub.org, is to produce a nightly tarball of the derived
docs *generated from the currently checked-in sources*.  As someone who
doesn't have the doc prep tools installed locally, I know I would find
that very useful.  Right now, I have the choice of looking at 6.4.* docs
or raw SGML :-(.

If you don't want to change our distribution practices to the extent
of having separate source-code and doc tarfiles, then it'd at least be
a good idea to regenerate the derived docs as part of the nightly
snapshot-building run, so that the snapshots contain up-to-date derived
files rather than historical artifacts...
        regards, tom lane