Re: Questions about the changelog file
2009/4/18 Laurent Léonard <laurent@open-minds.org>:
> Is there a standard or a recommendation for the content of the changelog
> file ?
You'll find all of Debian's policies and best practices WRT
debian/changelog in debian-policy and developers-reference.
http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/
http://www.debian.org/doc/developers-reference/
For how people actually do things, check your /usr/share/doc and or
install apt-listchanges and configure it to show you all changelogs
before installation. I think reading existing changelogs will give you
a good idea of Debian's changelog style.
For upstream changelogs there is the recommendations in the GNU coding
standards document:
http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/
The various vcs2cl scripts seem to try and adhere to the
recommendations in that.
> - Is it better to specify the modified file or not ? For example if I add a
> build dependency, should I specify I added it to debian/control ?
Depends, for example for patches it can help when years later someone
is trying to track down the origin of a patch and the reason for its
existence (those should be documented in the patch header though). In
your example, I don't think it matters either way since everyone knows
where build-depends go.
For upstream changelogs it is usually more useful to do this, and the
GNU standards doc does recommend it.
> - Is it better to specify the file concerned by the change at the beginning of
> the sentence before a ":" character ? Or included in the sentence ?
Either is fine, I do a mix of both I think.
> - Is it better to group the changes by file and specify a sort of hierarchy
> like this ?
> * debian/control:
> - Change 1.
> - Change 2.
Sometimes that can be useful.
> - Is there an order for the changes (importance...) ?
Whatever you prefer, sometimes I seem to go for sorted by line length,
most other times the order in which I made the changes.
> - Is it better to end the sentence by a final point or not ?
Personal taste, I tend to leave them off, one less byte :)
> - Should I use for example:
> "Added ...", "Fixed ...", "Updated ..."
> or "Add ...", "Fix ...", "Update ..." ?
Personal taste, I think I've done both of those.
--
bye,
pabs
http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
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