Matt Zimmerman wrote: > My reasons for arguing were basically these: > > - by having all of the information in one place, folks who are reading the > changelog also get the benefit of the NEWS stuff, which is often useful in > a changelog context as well OTOH if I'm already reading a package's changelog file, I have probably exhausted most other documentation, including README.Debian and NEWS.Debian if present. Unless I'm reading it during upgrade of course. > - (a selfish one) I wouldn't have to figure out how to appropriately display > both kinds of information in apt-listchanges Heh, yes. > > I would like to get support into apt-listchanges for displaying those news > > entries. I can think of two useful modes and a variation: > > > > 1. Display only news items, no changelogs. > > > > 2. Display changelogs and news items > > a. List all the new news first, at the top. > > b. List new news right before a package's changelog entry. > > > > What to display should be configurable of course. If we decided to make > > apt-listchanges part of the base system, it might be good to change the > > default behavior to 1. > > I agree re: option 1; that would be a sane configuration default. If you agree with that, then implementing that with a merged changelog would require some considerable munging/grepping of the changelog, would it not? > Option 2b works out to pretty much exactly the combined news/changelog > format that I had in mind. I don't like 2a very much because it spreads out > the information about a single package, such that I would have to navigate > around the output in order to correlate the news with the changelog. OTOH, I really like 2a, as I don't always make it to the end of apt-listchanges output during a large upgrade. > > Matt, do you have strong feelings against separate NEWS.Debian files, or > > would something like this be accepted, if it were done right and you were > > given a patch? > > If I am in the minority, I will not hold back the entire NEWS concept just > because of the file format issue, because I want to see this happen. Ok, well I don't know how to tell if you are in the minority. In the old thread I think you were mostly alone in wanting a separate file. > The current mechanism is designed to extract only one file, so the pipe > mechanism works out pretty well. You could have changed things to call > extract_changelog twice as well. I think, though, that if apt-listchanges > is to start extracting multiple files, I'd probably want to just extract > them to a temporary directory. That way, it doesn't have to make more > passes over the .deb, nor would I have to deal with getting them both in a > single stream. Yes a temp directory is probably a good idea. -- see shy jo
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