Re: Release note trimming: another modest proposal

> On Aug 6, 2018, at 1:22 PM, Jonathan S. Katz <jkatz@postgresql.org> wrote:
> I can make a quick prototype of this on pgweb just to see how easy it is to get
> the release notes up in it. Basically, once the archived ones are in pgweb, we
> would not need to have to build them anymore.

Attached is a screenshot of something real quick I drew up. I was able to
generate these notes from what was already loaded in via “docload” (which
is what happens in every release).

I did manually edit the xref’s in order to have them appear more cleanly, but
I should be able to script the process.

To quote you earlier, yes there is a bit of nontrivial work here, but I do think
we have most of the tools in place to do this. What I am thinking is the
following:

1. Add to the “docload” script to segment out the release notes and store
them in a separate table. Perform an “upsert” (i.e. check for an existing
reference; if it’s there, update any content, otherwise insert).

2. Perform any modifications to the content (i.e. there’s some HTML I
explicitly removed from the generated docs).

3. Display the archived docs on the page.

That way in future docloads, if there are missing release notes, the script
would be ok as it would not remove any release notes.

This strategy *should* also work with displaying current release notes on the
site, as it’s basically following what docload currently does, if we wanted to
go down this patch.

Once we run this for the first time with the collection of *all* release notes,
we could then trim down release.sgml et al. And thus as far as I can tell, you
would not have to modify anything in the doc build process.

Thoughts?

Jonathan