Enhanced Postgres Release Notes

There is something new you may not have seen in the release notes for Postgres 17. No, not a new feature - I mean inside the actual release notes themselves! The Postgres project uses the git program to track commits to the project, and now each item in the release notes has a link to the actual commit (or multiple commits) that enabled it.

You may have missed it if you were scanning the release notes, but after the end of each specific item in the release note is a small “section” symbol which looks like this: §. Each of these symbols is a link leading to the relevant commit for that item. Here’s what it looks like on the Postgres 17 release notes page:

Clicking the section symbol will send you to the GIT link for each individual patch, for example, this one:

Note that there’s a “Discussion” link in each commit linking back to the full thread on the hackers channel.

Writing the release notes is hard work, and involves a good bit of debate in the community. We have to make sure we list all the changes, in a concise yet comprehensible manner, and decide what level of detail to include. Oftentimes, this level is not sufficient for people interested in learning about this feature. That’s where these new commit links are invaluable. They link to the git commit, which not only lets you see the exact code changes that were made, but show the actual commit message, which has more detail than what can be provided in the release notes.

Postgres Notes in Lots of Places

Postgres release notes appear in lots of different places so this addition will surely make its way into other downstream projects. This new link also now appears on “postgres all versions” - a project that I maintain that collates the information from all of the release notes for every version of Postgres (over 500 now!) into a single page. To make the link more visible and easier to use, I converted it to a larger Unicode scroll symbol, then added some tooltip tech to make it show information about the link like so:

There was some community debate about including this, and about how prominent to make it. I think we ended up a little too cryptic and subtle with this section mark, but I welcome the addition and find it extraordinarily useful. I’d love to see the www Postgres project adopt a bigger symbol and tooltips in the future too!

The Postgres project takes the quality of its code very seriously, and that extends to the git commit messages as well. You will find them quite detailed; they not only describe the change that has been made, but have a link back to the mailing list discussion, as well as giving credit to the people who authored the change, discovered the bug, or otherwise helped out. A great new addition to the release notes!