On Friday, July 4, 2003, at 04:02 AM, Luca - De Whiskey's - De Vitis wrote:
Just curious: why not NEWS.gz for native packages?
It's prohibitively difficult to detect whether any given file is in debian changelog format.
NEWS[.gz] exists in many packages already, and is of no particular format in general, apt-listchanges doesn't know what to do with it (and will in fact display the entire file every time). Since we can't rely on the existence of NEWS.Debian.gz (as it's not required, like the changelog is) we can't tell which file is the one we're looking for by filename alone.
So, instead, we have decided that mandating NEWS.Debian is a better solution.