Re: changes file format

[Bruce Perens <bruce@Pixar.com>]

mitchell@mdd.comm.mot.com said:
> Please add "and document" to this.  If tools are introduced into the 
> distribution, the author and maintainer of those tools should provide 
> and maintain man pages for them. 

Yes, that makes sense. The parse wasn't immediately obvious to me. For
example, is the semicolon significant? An explanation of the format, as
well as the use of the tools, is called for.

mitchell@mdd.comm.mot.com said:
> I also reiterate my suggestion that we stop the practice of 
> maintainers announcing directly (and prematurely) to debian-changes, 
> and have the maintainer announcements uploaded to debian.org along 
> with the other package files, machine-parsed there, and 
> machine-produced announcements in whatever announcement format is 
> deemed appropriate incorporating information from the machine-parsed 
> maintainer uploads made from debian.org once the packages being 
> announced are actually available as part of the distribution.

This is why I require both a parser and a program to generate the input.
Because the format _looks_ free-form, there is less "psychological
pressure" to format the document with a machine parse in mind.

Once this parser is provided, we will make a script for the FTP
maintainer to run that will move the package into place and announce the
upload to debian-changes.

	Thanks

	Bruce