Re: changelog vs ChangeLog and policy dictates
"Christian Hudon" <chrish@debian.org> writes:
> 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.
Consistent with other Debian packages, but not necessarily consistent with
the other documentation in the package.
> 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?
I think here you could symlink changelog.gz to CHANGES2.8.gz only. After
all, unless you're a lynx developer, do you really wish to see such a long
history? Alternatively, I think you could provide one cat'ed file, as you
do now, and install CHANGES* as well. With your current system it's
a major change to the structure of the original documentation - I don't
think it is appropriate for a package maintainer to be changing the
upstream source so significantly.
> Am I the only one who thing this symlink idea ('preserving the upstream
> changelog name') is just a needless complication?
It isn't a complication. It is designed to provide consistency for both
the whole Debian system and each individual package.
> 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
I haven't seen a path mentioned too often in docs. However sometimes the
top of a README contains a list of doc files that should come with the
package. If you change the names of some of those files, or combine some
of the files into other files, it looks quite inconsistent.
> 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).
Right, the symlink should facilitate this consistency.
> 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.
Instead of speculating, perhaps you could compile some figures on this?
Martin.
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