On Sat, Jul 06, 2002 at 09:13:51PM -0400, Joey Hess wrote: > So we were talking at DebConf about the issue of overuse of debconf > notes for warning the user of things like major changes on upgrades. One > idea that gelled out is adding a NEWS.Debian file to supplement the > README.Debian and changelog.Debian files. > By analogy with the type of package that upstream has a very verbose and > detailed changelog and then a NEWS file that gives a broad overview of > important changes and points to additional information (wmaker for > example), the NEWS.Debian file, which would not be updated with every > release of the package would talk about things that you might be tempted > today to misuse a debconf note for. > Like the changelog.Debian (and unlike README.Debian, which would still > be used to record more general debian-specific info), the NEWS.Debian > would be in a machine parseable format, so tools like apt-listchanges > could work out if a new news item is relevent and display it. A user > might want to see both changelogs and NEWS, or just one. > So like debconf notes that are displayed before the package is > installed, the NEWS items could warn of incompatabilities, serious bugs, > whatever. Unlike debconf notes, a user could turn the NEWS off, and > could revisit it (or read it for the first time) after installation by > reading the file. Debconf notes would remain for their intended purpose: > notes about local installation errors, and so on. It seems to me that this addresses the issues involved: giving maintainers a way to inform users of important changes, while giving users the freedom to disable these notifications. As long as this behavior is enabled by default, I think this is a wonderful idea. Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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