Re: Best practices for changelogs

[Gerfried Fuchs <rhonda@deb.at>]

* Andres Mejia <mcitadel@gmail.com> [2007-11-19 04:44:44 CET]:
> Last I checked, mentors.d.n doesn't allow you to upload without the
> orig.tar.gz, even if you have uploaded the tarball already.

 If this is true then I can all but encourage to *not* use mentors.d.n
for sharing the files. Being forced to do sourceful uploads is a real
PITA like you mentioned yourself for bigger packages, and is totally
contrary to what one would need to do for an upload to the Debian pool.
 
> When I said this, I was thinking about the end user of a program that
> doesn't particularly care about how it's packaged, they only care if
> it works. I'm sure these kind of users exist. The changelog is of
> course useful for a lot of things and for a lot of users.

 Of course those do exist, that still doesn't mean that they are the
only ones out there, or the ones that are relevant for us to provide
proper changelogs.

> I'll continue to increment the changelog after each upload cycle to
> mentors.d.n and I'll inform anyone who's sponsoring accordingly.

 As long as you inform the sponsors accordingly it is alright, still it
is of course a source to errors - some might not mention it to their
sponsors so I don't want to encourage this behavior generally. I see no
big problem if one is in contact with a sponsor for uploading and
keeping the SVN in sync with reducing the multiple changelog versions to
a single one; and if that's possible I personally prefer it.

> For one, because it's easy to use the proper dpkg-buildpackage
> options, both for maintainers and for sponsors, and two, because I
> think it's easier to find changes after each upload this way (sponsors
> can diff the diff for instance).

 Well, interdiff between the former and the newer .diff.gz is a bit
easier if one doesn't need to have to remember move the old one aside,
but it also might mean one wouldn't do the interdiff to the former
upload anymore but only looking at the ones between the two uploads to
the site of preference.

> Of course now I'll also try to upload an acceptable package the first
> time.

 Does this statement imply that you didn't try that before? ;)  Sorry,
just a nitpicking question.

 So long,
Rhonda