Bug#459427: changelog vs. NEWS handling
Russ Allbery writes ("Bug#459427: changelog vs. NEWS handling"):
> Unfortunately, there's no good way to do this transition without making a
> whole ton of packages buggy, since we're horribly inconsistent about how
> we handle this now. I think that's just something we should tackle, and
> make it very clear that this is a *minor* bug and people shouldn't harass
> maintainers about it, but we'd like to sort out this historic mess and
> switch to consistent usage of these two files.
We could avoid making all packages buggy, by giving more flexible
advice.
The kind of stuff found in an upstream NEWS clearly ought to be in the
.deb somewhere. The kind of stuff found in a "git log" is useless.
The policy was written when lots of packges had a GNU-style ChangeLog,
and those can be useful. I have sometimes looked in them (in their
guise as /usr/share/doc/P/changelog) to find out why something is
broken.
IMO it all depends on what upstream does.
Is there some reason why exacdt standardisation of the filenames is
necessary here ? For most of the uses I can think of, it is OK to
look in a handful of files to see which one might answer the question.
Ian.
--
Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk> These opinions are my own.
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