Re: Proposal for Lenny: Please avoid duplicated changelogs for binary packages sharing the same source package

["Tshepang Lekhonkhobe" <tshepang@gmail.com>]

On 1/2/07, Tshepang Lekhonkhobe <tshepang@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/2/07, Pierre Habouzit <madcoder@debian.org> wrote:
> > On Tue, Jan 02, 2007 at 04:28:59PM +0200, Tshepang Lekhonkhobe wrote:
> > > On 1/2/07, Pierre Habouzit <madcoder@debian.org> wrote:
> > > Why not have an extra /usr/share/doc/$source-name directory in case a
> > > binary package of the same name doesn't exist or is not found to be
> > > installed. This would be a problem when dependencies change, but on
> > > package removal, /usr/share/doc/$source-name would be left alone if
> > > there remains binary packages built from that source package.
> >
> >   That's what $package-common packages are for. But just to hold the
> > copyright and changelog that's an overkill because those packages would
> > need some kind of garbage collection somehow and that i'm quite sure
> > that it would use more mirror resources than the repeated changelogs.
> >
> >   Well all in one it's not worth the effort, and has many drawbacks
> > IMHO. I'd say that's a thing you may consider when you already need a
> > $package-common for your packaging, but it's not necessarily a good
> > idea.
> >
> >   just to know what we are talking about, on my system:
> >
> >     du /usr/share/doc/*/changelog.Debian.gz: 16M
> >     du /usr/share/doc/*/copyright: 15M
> >     du /usr/lib/iceweasel/firefox-bin: 15M
> >
> >   so well, if it's not nothing, it's still quite small, and I can't
> > imagine a system where 30M is an issue nowadays (well except PDA's or
> > so, but here the whole /usr/share/doc is an issue at once anyway, like
> > Don already explained it - on my system /usr/share/doc is 234M big).
>
> Pretty well-justified that this would be a useless effort. Along with
> Don's mention that binary packages don't have to be the same version
> it just shows that my proposal sucks.
>
> thanks

By the way, this proposal was made because I browsed through
/usr/share/doc/$package/changelog.Debian.gz to find that they were the
same for different binary packages and expecting otherwise. I guess
it's too much trouble doing separate changelogs for binary packages.

One other important note:
If a large src package builds multiple binary packages, a small change
on one of those binary packages (say OOo) which is unrelated to the
other binary packages, will cause all those other binary packages to
be rebuilt and require upgrading, which seems like a waste.