Freezing docs for v6.5

Thomas Lockhart wrote:

I've frozen the docs sources for the Programmer's Guide, and have
generated the hardcopy. I'm planning on generating the Tutorial,
INSTALL, and HISTORY tonight, and the User's Guide tomorrow.

Bruce, are install.sgml and release.sgml finished?

I am looking for updates to ref/{lock,set}.sgml for MVCC and related
changes, which go into the User's Guide. I'm out of town Saturday Jun
5 01:00 UTC through Monday June 7 5:00 UTC, so will need the updates
by tomorrow or I'll need to ask for yet another extension.

I'll post these changes today directly to you.
Text version...

Vadim

I'll post these changes today directly to you.
Text version...

Thanks :)

- Thomas

--
Thomas Lockhart lockhart@alumni.caltech.edu
South Pasadena, California

I've frozen the docs sources for the Programmer's Guide, and have
generated the hardcopy. I'm planning on generating the Tutorial,
INSTALL, and HISTORY tonight, and the User's Guide tomorrow.

Bruce, are install.sgml and release.sgml finished?

I am looking for updates to ref/{lock,set}.sgml for MVCC and related
changes, which go into the User's Guide. I'm out of town Saturday Jun
5 01:00 UTC through Monday June 7 5:00 UTC, so will need the updates
by tomorrow or I'll need to ask for yet another extension.

No, nor is the ref stuff done. Extend it.

-- 
  Bruce Momjian                        |  http://www.op.net/~candle
  maillist@candle.pha.pa.us            |  (610) 853-3000
  +  If your life is a hard drive,     |  830 Blythe Avenue
  +  Christ can be your backup.        |  Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania 19026

I've frozen the docs sources for the Programmer's Guide, and have
generated the hardcopy. I'm planning on generating the Tutorial,
INSTALL, and HISTORY tonight, and the User's Guide tomorrow.
Bruce, are install.sgml and release.sgml finished?
I am looking for updates to ref/{lock,set}.sgml for MVCC and related
changes, which go into the User's Guide. I'm out of town Saturday Jun
5 01:00 UTC through Monday June 7 5:00 UTC, so will need the updates
by tomorrow or I'll need to ask for yet another extension.

No, nor is the ref stuff done. Extend it.

Whoops! The "No" means that install.sgml and release.sgml are not
finished? What else needs to be done on them? I've made some very
minor wording and markup changes in the release notes, and will commit
those tonight. the Programmer's Guide and the Tutorial are finished,
and I was hoping to do INSTALL, HISTORY, and the Admin Guide (all of
which need install.sgml and release.sgml to be done) tonight.

Vadim sez he'll send some plain text updates (hopefully for the ref
pages) tomorrow, so I should be able to get that incorporated into the
User's Guide then.

- Thomas

--
Thomas Lockhart lockhart@alumni.caltech.edu
South Pasadena, California

I've frozen the docs sources for the Programmer's Guide, and have
generated the hardcopy. I'm planning on generating the Tutorial,
INSTALL, and HISTORY tonight, and the User's Guide tomorrow.

Bruce, are install.sgml and release.sgml finished?

I am looking for updates to ref/{lock,set}.sgml for MVCC and related
changes, which go into the User's Guide. I'm out of town Saturday Jun
5 01:00 UTC through Monday June 7 5:00 UTC, so will need the updates
by tomorrow or I'll need to ask for yet another extension.

If someone else can take on the lock/set grammar changes, that would be
great. I did a cvs diff of gram.y from the 6.4.2 date and current, and
there is what needs to be changed.

-- 
  Bruce Momjian                        |  http://www.op.net/~candle
  maillist@candle.pha.pa.us            |  (610) 853-3000
  +  If your life is a hard drive,     |  830 Blythe Avenue
  +  Christ can be your backup.        |  Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania 19026

Thomas Lockhart wrote:

I've frozen the docs sources for the Programmer's Guide, and have
generated the hardcopy. I'm planning on generating the Tutorial,
INSTALL, and HISTORY tonight, and the User's Guide tomorrow.
Bruce, are install.sgml and release.sgml finished?
I am looking for updates to ref/{lock,set}.sgml for MVCC and related
changes, which go into the User's Guide. I'm out of town Saturday Jun
5 01:00 UTC through Monday June 7 5:00 UTC, so will need the updates
by tomorrow or I'll need to ask for yet another extension.

No, nor is the ref stuff done. Extend it.

Whoops! The "No" means that install.sgml and release.sgml are not
finished? What else needs to be done on them? I've made some very
minor wording and markup changes in the release notes, and will commit
those tonight. the Programmer's Guide and the Tutorial are finished,
and I was hoping to do INSTALL, HISTORY, and the Admin Guide (all of
which need install.sgml and release.sgml to be done) tonight.

Vadim sez he'll send some plain text updates (hopefully for the ref
pages) tomorrow, so I should be able to get that incorporated into the

For lock.sgml and set.sgml. I assume that they are used for lock and
set man pages which I would like to use as sources for updation.

User's Guide then.

BTW, I have some notes for release.sgml, "Migration to v6.5" section,
about using contrib/refint.* - one will have to use LOCK statements
to get it working properly, -:(. I'll write it in the next 12 hours...

Vadim

Whoops! The "No" means that install.sgml and release.sgml are not
finished? What else needs to be done on them? I've made some very
minor wording and markup changes in the release notes, and will commit
those tonight. the Programmer's Guide and the Tutorial are finished,
and I was hoping to do INSTALL, HISTORY, and the Admin Guide (all of
which need install.sgml and release.sgml to be done) tonight.

Vadim sez he'll send some plain text updates (hopefully for the ref
pages) tomorrow, so I should be able to get that incorporated into the
User's Guide then.

Sorry. Install is done. release notes just need to be finalized with
all listed changes. When should we say no more? Things are still
happening in the fix area, I think.

The man pages and sgml/ref stuff is the hard part. I am not sure what
they all do, and was discouraged to see the 'set' manual page doesn't
have lots of stuff that should be in there, and are in the sgml version.
The psql \h stuff also needs work. I am pretty busy with other stuff
for the next two days. That is the problem.

-- 
  Bruce Momjian                        |  http://www.op.net/~candle
  maillist@candle.pha.pa.us            |  (610) 853-3000
  +  If your life is a hard drive,     |  830 Blythe Avenue
  +  Christ can be your backup.        |  Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania 19026

Vadim sez he'll send some plain text updates (hopefully for the ref
pages) tomorrow

For lock.sgml and set.sgml. I assume that they are used for lock and
set man pages which I would like to use as sources for updation.

The sgml produces html and ps formats. The man pages are not (yet)
generated automatically from the sgml, but will be in some future
release (offers of help on the conversion have not yet resulted in
actual help...).

I would appreciate getting the updates inside of ref/{lock,set}.sgml,
and then you or someone else can update the man pages while I am
working on the hardcopy.

BTW, I have some notes for release.sgml, "Migration to v6.5" section,
about using contrib/refint.* - one will have to use LOCK statements
to get it working properly, -:(. I'll write it in the next 12 hours...

OK, great. That might delay me a bit, but it will be well worth it. I
had hoped to run through another ~200 pages of hardcopy tonight, but
am on hold for both the release notes and the User's Guide.

If you can get to the release notes first, then I can go ahead and
finish 3 docs (the Admin Guide, INSTALL, and HISTORY).

Thanks for all of your work. Hope this crunch isn't too painful :/

- Thomas

--
Thomas Lockhart lockhart@alumni.caltech.edu
South Pasadena, California

Thomas Lockhart wrote:

Vadim sez he'll send some plain text updates (hopefully for the ref
pages) tomorrow

For lock.sgml and set.sgml. I assume that they are used for lock and
set man pages which I would like to use as sources for updation.

The sgml produces html and ps formats. The man pages are not (yet)
generated automatically from the sgml, but will be in some future
release (offers of help on the conversion have not yet resulted in
actual help...).

I would appreciate getting the updates inside of ref/{lock,set}.sgml,

Ok.

and then you or someone else can update the man pages while I am
working on the hardcopy.

BTW, I have some notes for release.sgml, "Migration to v6.5" section,
about using contrib/refint.* - one will have to use LOCK statements
to get it working properly, -:(. I'll write it in the next 12 hours...

OK, great. That might delay me a bit, but it will be well worth it. I
had hoped to run through another ~200 pages of hardcopy tonight, but
am on hold for both the release notes and the User's Guide.

If you can get to the release notes first, then I can go ahead and
finish 3 docs (the Admin Guide, INSTALL, and HISTORY).

Ok. In the next 3 hours... ok?

Vadim

On Thu, 3 Jun 1999, Thomas Lockhart wrote:

If you can get to the release notes first, then I can go ahead and
finish 3 docs (the Admin Guide, INSTALL, and HISTORY).

Thanks for all of your work. Hope this crunch isn't too painful :/

How are we doing for the 7th as a release? Need a couple of more days to
touch up docs? Or are we okay for the 7th?

Marc G. Fournier ICQ#7615664 IRC Nick: Scrappy
Systems Administrator @ hub.org
primary: scrappy@hub.org secondary: scrappy@{freebsd|postgresql}.org

Whoops! The "No" means that install.sgml and release.sgml are not
finished? What else needs to be done on them? I've made some very
minor wording and markup changes in the release notes, and will commit
those tonight. the Programmer's Guide and the Tutorial are finished,
and I was hoping to do INSTALL, HISTORY, and the Admin Guide (all of
which need install.sgml and release.sgml to be done) tonight.

Vadim sez he'll send some plain text updates (hopefully for the ref
pages) tomorrow, so I should be able to get that incorporated into the

For lock.sgml and set.sgml. I assume that they are used for lock and
set man pages which I would like to use as sources for updation.

The man pages and sgml pages are separate, and require separate
maintenance.

-- 
  Bruce Momjian                        |  http://www.op.net/~candle
  maillist@candle.pha.pa.us            |  (610) 853-3000
  +  If your life is a hard drive,     |  830 Blythe Avenue
  +  Christ can be your backup.        |  Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania 19026

How are we doing for the 7th as a release? Need a couple of more days
to touch up docs? Or are we okay for the 7th?

Not sure yet. I expect that I will need an extra day or two since I'm
out of town for the 5th and 6th. But if we plan to slip, then the
stuff I need might slip too :/

Tom Lane is still chasing bugs with great efficiency, so an extra day
to test a "candidate release tarball" (missing only a few of the docs)
could certainly do no harm. If nothing else it would let us test the
tarball to make sure that the yacc/bison file phasing is OK (this has
bit us a few times recently).

- Thomas

--
Thomas Lockhart lockhart@alumni.caltech.edu
South Pasadena, California

On Thu, 3 Jun 1999, Thomas Lockhart wrote:

How are we doing for the 7th as a release? Need a couple of more days
to touch up docs? Or are we okay for the 7th?

Not sure yet. I expect that I will need an extra day or two since I'm
out of town for the 5th and 6th. But if we plan to slip, then the
stuff I need might slip too :/

Tom Lane is still chasing bugs with great efficiency, so an extra day
to test a "candidate release tarball" (missing only a few of the docs)
could certainly do no harm. If nothing else it would let us test the
tarball to make sure that the yacc/bison file phasing is OK (this has
bit us a few times recently).

Okay, let's go with a 'pre-release' tarball for the 7th and a release on
the 9th then, if no objections?

Marc G. Fournier ICQ#7615664 IRC Nick: Scrappy
Systems Administrator @ hub.org
primary: scrappy@hub.org secondary: scrappy@{freebsd|postgresql}.org

Thomas Lockhart <lockhart@alumni.caltech.edu> writes:

Tom Lane is still chasing bugs with great efficiency,

Chasing 'em, anyway; no claims about efficiency :-). Most of the stuff
on my "to fix" list is not showstopper material; it'd be nice to get it
done before 6.5 but I won't feel bad if it isn't. There's always
another bug...

The two bugs I am really concerned about right now are the
inheritance-vs-GROUP-BY issue and the bogus-cache-entries-not-flushed-
at-xact-abort issue, because I am not sure I know enough to fix either
one right, and there is very little testing time left. These are bad
bugs, but they exist in older releases too, so maybe we should just
leave 'em alone for 6.5? Opinions? (There seem to be some nontrivial
open issues in locking and segmented relations, too, so maybe there is
enough stuff here to delay the release while we fix these things?)

so an extra day
to test a "candidate release tarball" (missing only a few of the docs)
could certainly do no harm. If nothing else it would let us test the
tarball to make sure that the yacc/bison file phasing is OK (this has
bit us a few times recently).

In theory, that problem is Permanently Fixed, since the derived yacc
files are no longer in the CVS tree but are created on-the-fly during
tarball preparation. In practice, we should double-check it.

You've all seen this one, right?
Q: What is the difference between theory and practice?
A: In theory, there is no difference.

regards, tom lane

Sorry. Install is done. release notes just need to be finalized with
all listed changes. When should we say no more? Things are still
happening in the fix area, I think.

OK, I'm freezing install.sgml and release.sgml. Feel free to make
changes to release.sgml, and *if* you limit the changes to one or a
few one-liners I can update the hardcopy at the last minute. But we
should document release info up to the last minute rather than leaving
something out because docs were supposed to be frozen.

The man pages and sgml/ref stuff is the hard part. I am not sure what
they all do, and was discouraged to see the 'set' manual page doesn't
have lots of stuff that should be in there, and are in the sgml version.
The psql \h stuff also needs work. I am pretty busy with other stuff
for the next two days. That is the problem.

No problem. afaik the sgml sources are almost done, with a couple of
patches coming from Vadim sometime soon. imho the original man pages
are doing pretty well, and we aren't promising that they are as
complete or voluminous as the html docs.

The "set" man page is probably the most out of date since there were
several new commands added recently. So if you have a chance to update
that one things are likely to be good enough.

- Thomas

--
Thomas Lockhart lockhart@alumni.caltech.edu
South Pasadena, California

On Thu, 3 Jun 1999, Tom Lane wrote:

The two bugs I am really concerned about right now are the
inheritance-vs-GROUP-BY issue and the bogus-cache-entries-not-flushed-
at-xact-abort issue, because I am not sure I know enough to fix either
one right, and there is very little testing time left. These are bad
bugs, but they exist in older releases too, so maybe we should just
leave 'em alone for 6.5? Opinions? (There seem to be some nontrivial
open issues in locking and segmented relations, too, so maybe there is
enough stuff here to delay the release while we fix these things?)

If the 'bugs' aren't something new we created since v6.4.2, leave them
alone...would be nice to fix them, but nobody expected them to work to
date, so leavign it for v6.6 (or even a v6.5.1) is acceptable...

Marc G. Fournier ICQ#7615664 IRC Nick: Scrappy
Systems Administrator @ hub.org
primary: scrappy@hub.org secondary: scrappy@{freebsd|postgresql}.org

If the 'bugs' aren't something new we created since v6.4.2, leave them
alone...would be nice to fix them, but nobody expected them to work to
date, so leavign it for v6.6 (or even a v6.5.1) is acceptable...

Isn't minor bugfixing in 6.5.1 a no-no. We only do major fixes in those
minor releases, right?

-- 
  Bruce Momjian                        |  http://www.op.net/~candle
  maillist@candle.pha.pa.us            |  (610) 853-3000
  +  If your life is a hard drive,     |  830 Blythe Avenue
  +  Christ can be your backup.        |  Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania 19026

The Hermit Hacker <scrappy@hub.org> writes:

On Thu, 3 Jun 1999, Tom Lane wrote:

The two bugs I am really concerned about right now are the
inheritance-vs-GROUP-BY issue and the bogus-cache-entries-not-flushed-
at-xact-abort issue, because I am not sure I know enough to fix either
one right, and there is very little testing time left. These are bad
bugs, but they exist in older releases too, so maybe we should just
leave 'em alone for 6.5?

If the 'bugs' aren't something new we created since v6.4.2, leave them
alone...would be nice to fix them, but nobody expected them to work to
date, so leavign it for v6.6 (or even a v6.5.1) is acceptable...

I don't mind postponing the inheritance/GROUP-BY issue on that basis,
because it's an identifiable feature that doesn't work (and never has
worked). I'm more troubled about the cache issue, because that could
give rise to hard-to-predict flaky behavior; we might waste a lot of
time chasing bug reports that ultimately reduce to that problem but
are not easily recognizable as such.

Bruce seemed to think that we could just flush the sys caches and
relation cache completely during xact abort. This would probably be
less efficient than identifying the specific entries to get rid of, but
it would plug the hole in the dike well enough for 6.5. Any objections
to doing that?

regards, tom lane

Bruce seemed to think that we could just flush the sys caches and
relation cache completely during xact abort. This would probably be
less efficient than identifying the specific entries to get rid of, but
it would plug the hole in the dike well enough for 6.5. Any objections
to doing that?

I don't see how we could do anything more aggressive at this point,
though the flush may have some side-affects we don't know about yet,
even though it works for temp tables.

-- 
  Bruce Momjian                        |  http://www.op.net/~candle
  maillist@candle.pha.pa.us            |  (610) 853-3000
  +  If your life is a hard drive,     |  830 Blythe Avenue
  +  Christ can be your backup.        |  Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania 19026