Re: Beta1 announcement: alpha1 draft

On 04/27/2016 08:48 AM, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
> On 04/26/2016 08:46 PM, Josh berkus wrote:
>> On 04/26/2016 06:49 PM, Robert Haas wrote:
>
>>> I think the last version JD posted was much better.
>>
>> It was a much better description with *you* as the target audience, yes.
>>   However, you are not very representative of the majority of our users.
>>   My goal is to provide text which will make some sense to people who
>> haven't paid any attention to PostgreSQL development since 9.5 was
>> released.
>>
>
> I have been thinking about this more and I think I have a middle ground.
> We should include my wording or wording that is similar to mine but we
> should also include a link to a single page that discusses the
> "practitioner" version of those features. The page should be simple:

That's the typical "what's new" page, which I'll be creating soon if
someone doesn't beat me to it (please leave out the apostrophe to avoid
mediawiki issues, though).

However, we need to have the "why this matters" in the beta annoucement
itself, for two reasons:

1. our beta announcements get some press coverage, so the press needs to
be able to quote the new features;

2. we want DBAs who haven't upgraded since 9.2 to get excited enough
about one or more features to test them.

If anything, we should have the "pithy" items in the original
announcement, and links to the technical details on a wiki page, not the
other way around.

I'm also going to revisit the idea of only including five features.
Part of the idea of the beta annoucement is to get people to test our
features, and sometimes the features which need the most testing aren't
the banner-carrier ones.  Do we have other features which really warrant
extensive testing?

--
--
Josh Berkus
Red Hat OSAS
(any opinions are my own)