Re: First draft of PG 17 release notes

On Sat, May 18, 2024 at 11:13 AM Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> wrote:
>
> On Thu, May 16, 2024 at 09:09:11AM -0400, Melanie Plageman wrote:
> > On Wed, May 15, 2024 at 11:48 PM Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de> wrote:
> > >
> > > On 2024-05-15 10:38:20 +0200, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> > > > I disagree with this.  IMO the impact of the Sawada/Naylor change is
> > > > likely to be enormous for people with large tables and large numbers of
> > > > tuples to clean up (I know we've had a number of customers in this
> > > > situation, I can't imagine any Postgres service provider that doesn't).
> > > > The fact that maintenance_work_mem is no longer capped at 1GB is very
> > > > important and I think we should mention that explicitly in the release
> > > > notes, as setting it higher could make a big difference in vacuum run
> > > > times.
> > >
> > > +many.
> > >
> > > We're having this debate every release. I think the ongoing reticence to note
> > > performance improvements in the release notes is hurting Postgres.
> > >
> > > For one, performance improvements are one of the prime reason users
> > > upgrade. Without them being noted anywhere more dense than the commit log,
> > > it's very hard to figure out what improved for users. A halfway widely
> > > applicable performance improvement is far more impactful than many of the
> > > feature changes we do list in the release notes.
> >
> > The practical reason this matters to users is that they want to change
> > their configuration or expectations in response to performance
> > improvements.
> >
> > And also, as Jelte mentions upthread, describing performance
> > improvements made each release in Postgres makes it clear that we are
> > consistently improving it.
> >
> > > For another, it's also very frustrating for developers that focus on
> > > performance. The reticence to note their work, while noting other, far
> > > smaller, things in the release notes, pretty much tells us that our work isn't
> > > valued.
> >
> > +many
>
> Please see the email I just posted.  There are three goals we have to
> adjust for:
>
> 1.  short release notes so they are readable
> 2.  giving people credit for performance improvements
> 3.  showing people Postgres cares about performance

I agree with all three of these goals. I would even add to 3 "show
users Postgres is addressing their performance complaints". That in
particular makes me less excited about having a  "generic performance
release note item saying performance has been improved in the
following areas" (from your other email). I think that describing the
specific performance improvements is required to 1) allow users to
change expectations and configurations to take advantage of the
performance enhancements 2) ensure users know that their performance
concerns are being addressed.

> I would like to achieve 2 & 3 without harming #1.  My experience is if I
> am reading a long document, and I get to a section where I start to
> wonder, "Why should I care about this?", I start to skim the rest of
> the document.  I am particularly critical if I start to wonder, "Why
> does the author _think_ I should care about this?" becasue it feels like
> the author is writing for him/herself and not the audience.

I see what you are saying. We don't want to just end up with the whole
git log in the release notes. However, we know that not all users will
care about the same features. As someone said somewhere else in this
thread, presumably hackers spend time on features because some users
want them.

- Melanie