On Fri, Jan 22, 2016 at 10:43 AM, Alvaro Herrera <alvhe...@2ndquadrant.com> wrote: >> If we were to expand that to >> cover reviewers, we would then be overburdinging that system and we >> would probably end up removing all names from the release notes. > > To me, this reads just as a threat that "if you disturb the waters here > I will just remove all names and you will all be the poorer for it." > Please don't do that, it looks rude.
For my part, I am not sure the names in the release notes are actually all that helpful. What does and does not get credited there and how it gets credited is more random than I would like. And it's often hard to draw the line as to who contributed enough to deserve credit and who did not. In commit messages you can try to spell out the details, but as Bruce says, there's no room for that in the release notes. If a feature is credited as (Robert Haas, X, Y, Z) it's clear that I'm the principle author, but it's unclear whether I did 40% of the work or 90% of the work. If it's credited as (X, Robert Haas), that could mean X came up with the idea and wrote a patch which I then completely re-wrote from scratch using a different design and committed; or it could mean X came with an idea that was basically good and I wrote and debugged a 1000-line patch, and I rewrote 10% of it for some reason before committing. So even today, it's pretty hard to use the release notes as a way to measure depth of contribution. The problem is worse for people most of whose work is reviewing and committing rather than authoring, but if you put everybody's name on everything they reviewed, that wouldn't fix it. Instead, you'd tend to overvalue people who do a lot of shallow reviews relative to people who do a few very deep ones. I think we just have to resign ourselves to the fact that judging depth of contribution from the release notes, or even the commit log, is going to be rather difficult; and that different people will have different opinions about whose work is most meritorious. In other words, I fear that putting names in the release notes is just politicizing a process that ought to be about presenting the community's work in the best way possible. A new release ought to be about putting the whole community forward in the best light. -- Robert Haas EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
