Re: changelog vs ChangeLog and policy dictates

[Juan Cespedes <cespedes@debian.org>]

On Sat, Apr 11, 1998 at 04:36:14PM -0400, Dale Scheetz wrote:
> I am not on the policy mailing list, so please cc me on this thread.
> 
> Does/Should the policy manual detail which letters may, or may not, be
> upper or lower case?

	I think so.

> Is such a "violation" of policy a bug that should get higher severity than
> wishlist?

	Definition of "wishlist", by Ian Jackson:
"any feature request, and also any bugs that are very difficult to
fix due to major design considerations."

	IMHO, it's not a wishlist bug.  It's against our Policy,
and it's easy to fix.

> In defense of violating this policy:
> 
> Upper/Lower case lettering does not confuse the average reader.

	But it confuses many automatic readers.  I have several tools
to get information from a .deb extracting its /usr/doc/*/copyright,
/usr/doc/*/changelog.gz and /usr/doc/*/changelog.Debian.gz.

> The upstream source uses the ChangeLog style in the original source.

	I'm not saying that I prefer "changelog".  I'm only saying
that we should be consistent.

> I find the typology of ChangeLog much easier to read than changelog. They
> parse the same for me, and it is the fact that they don't parse the same
> for *nix systems that allows them to be of such value, even in this small
> case.

	I agree, but there is a problem here: our policy says it
should be "changelog.gz", and lots of our packages follow it.  I think
it's better to use all lower cas than to change our policy, and lots
of packages.

	Thanks.

-- 
Juan Cespedes


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