On Wednesday, April 15, Joey Hess wrote
> Herbert Xu wrote:
> > I have a question: What if a package has two or more upstream changelog files?
>
> I think you should chose the "best" (newest / most readable / most complete
> / preferred format), and install it as changelog.gz, and install the rest
> with their orignail names.
So let's take the example of lynx. The changelog is shipped as:
chrish@pianocktail:[~/debian/my-packages/lynx/lynx-2.8] >ls docs/CHANGES*
docs/CHANGES2.3 docs/CHANGES2.5 docs/CHANGES2.7
docs/CHANGES2.4 docs/CHANGES2.6 docs/CHANGES2.8
Right now, I cat the files together in the right order and install the
result as /usr/doc/lynx/changelog.gz It's consistent with other Debian
packages, and it allows the whole thing to be extracted automaitcally by a
script.
With the proposed symlink idea, what should I be doing? Keep the changelog
split into pieces, like it is in the upstream lynx? (But then it becomes
impossible to extract the whole changelog automatically to, say, put it on
the Debian web pages. Bad.) Create a bunch of CHANGES* symlinks to
changelog.gz? Or what else?
Am I the only one who thing this symlink idea ('preserving the upstream
changelog name') is just a needless complication? If there's anything
that'd be important to preserve, it's the *path* to the changelog that's
quoted in the upstream documentation. And that's obviously one thing we
can't preserve (think /usr/local/foo/docs/CHANGES, say). But once the user
knows the directory in which the changelog is located, it really doesn't
take a genius to figure out that
chrish@pianocktail:[/usr/doc/lynx] >ls
CRAWL.announce README.chartrans.gz changelog.gz
FM.announce README.gz copyright
PROBLEMS.gz about_lynx/ lynx_help/
README.Debian changelog.Debian.gz
maybe the changelog he's looking for is contained in the file changelog.gz
(instead of CHANGES or CHANGELOG or ChangeLog and God kowns how many other
variations).
And anyway, I'm ready to bet that in all the other documentation installed
on a Debian machine, there are only a few references to changelog files.
Christian
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