Re: changelogs, UNRELEASED, etc

[Niko Tyni <ntyni@iki.fi>]

On Tue, Aug 14, 2007 at 07:54:12PM +0200, gregor herrmann wrote:

> > > I don't like that. The changelog is a tool for developers, contributors,
> > > and advanced user maybe. I think it's important to be able to see who did
> > > what without resorting to "svn blame" or "svn log". The names really don't
> > > clutter much.
> > > 
> > > Furthermore I think it's important for the visibility of one's work and
> > > as you know it's possibly part of the motivation of someone to be properly
> > > credited for their work.
 
> I have no strong opinion about the first point but I agree with the
> second and support a change of our internal policy as well.

FWIW, I agree to both points, and I don't think our policy reflects
current practice here.

The (pkg-perl) policy statement was apparently written before there was
a widely accepted multimaintainer changelog format. From the devscripts
changelog:

devscripts (2.9) unstable; urgency=low
[...]
  [ Joey Hess ]
  * debchange: support generating multi-developer changelogs, currently only
    supporting the format used in this changelog entry. If multiple developers
    are detected it will automatically add [ Full Name ] lines to disambiguate
    who did what.
[...]
 -- Filippo Giunchedi <filippo@debian.org>  Wed, 20 Jul 2005 14:33:05 +0200

Some googling also lead to Joey's blog entry with more background:

 http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/devscripts/

I think this format has since become so common that we should allow
(and even recommend) it in the pkg-perl policy.

Cheers,
-- 
Niko Tyni   ntyni@iki.fi