On Mon, Aug 6, 2018, 05:57 Tom Lane <t...@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote: > We've been around on this before, I know, but I got annoyed about it > again while waiting around for test builds of the back-branch > documentation. I think that we need some policy about maintaining > back-branch release notes that's not "keep everything, forever". > The release notes are becoming an ever-larger fraction of the docs, > and that's not good for documentation maintenance or for download > bandwidth. As an example, looking at the US-letter PDF version of > the v10 docs, as things stand today: > > Total page count: 3550 > Pages in release notes for 10.x: 41 (1%) > Pages in release notes for older branches: 898 (25%) > Pages in release notes for pre-9.2 branches: 546 (15%) > > I've not measured directly, but it's a reasonable assumption that if > we dropped all the back-branch release notes the documentation build > time would drop about 25%, whichever format you were building. > > I also live in fear of overrunning TeX's hard-wired limits, in the > back branches that depend on a TeX-based PDF toolchain. We've hit > those before and been able to work around them, but I wouldn't count > on doing so again, and I sure don't want to discover that we have a > problem of that sort the day before a release deadline. Trimming the > release notes would definitely give us enough slack to not worry > about that before all those branches are EOL. > > We've discussed trimming the release notes before, and people have > objected on the grounds that they like being able to access ancient > notes from time to time. I'm not unsympathetic to that issue, but > does that access point need to be our daily working documentation? > > Anyway, I'd like to propose a compromise position that I don't think > has been discussed before: let's drop release notes for branches > that were already EOL when a given branch was released. So for > example, 9.3 and before would go away from v12, due out next year. > Working backwards, we'd drop 9.1 and before from v10, giving the 15% > savings in page count that I showed above. A quick measurement says > that would also trim the size of the v10 tarball by about 4%, which > is not a lot maybe but it's noticeable across a lot of downloads. > > It seems to me that this would still provide enough historical > info for just about any ordinary interest. We could discuss ways > of making a complete release-note archive available somewhere, > if "go dig in the git repo" doesn't seem like an adequate answer > for that. >
Works for me. Especially with a release note archive available somewhere. > > Thoughts? > > regards, tom lane > >
