On 05/11/2016 07:01 PM, Marc Haber wrote:
> On Wed, 11 May 2016 17:03:05 +0200, Nicolas Dandrimont
> <olasd@debian.org> wrote:
>> * Marc Haber <mh+debian-devel@zugschlus.de> [2016-05-11 10:47:52 +0200]:
>>
>>>> The third reason is the question of how much in detail the release
>>>> notes should actually be. In a strange way in the past they were too
>>>> short. That made me reluctant to suggest entries for low-popcon
>>>> packages as their significance doesn't match the prominence of being
>>>> mentioned in the notes.
>>>
>>> We could have a "show-release-notes" package containing a script that
>>> scans (pre-upgrade) the installed packages and shows all release-notes
>>> relevant to those packages. This would need the release notes to be in
>>> a somewhat automatically-selectable format, most easily a http-served
>>> directory somewhere with a packagename.txt for each package that has
>>> relevant text that went past the package maintainer and the release
>>> team. Some thought needs to go in there for the cases where package
>>> foo is superseded by foo2. Most easily this could be a simple symlink
>>> in the releasenotes directory.
>>
>> That really sounds like what apt-listchanges already does.
>
> apt-listchanges drowns the user in the change logs, most of which are
> irrevant. I think of a solution that will show text that has been
> vetted by the package maintainer _and_ the release teams and that
> documents possible breakage during updates only. At this point, I
> don't care that a package has bumped its Standards-Version: field, or
> that a new person was added to Uploaders:.
At least on my system (default configuration) apt-listchanges shows
only NEWS.Debian, not changelog.Debian. The only qualm I have with
it is that there appears to be no option to abort the install after
apt-listchanges displays the changes: I run apt-get upgrade, then
it asks me if I want to update that list of packages, I answer yes,
then it downloads them all, apt-listchanges shows the NEWS files in
the configured pager ('less' in my case), and the only option I
have (other than logging in on another console and force-killing
APT) is to exit the pager with q, upon which APT immediately starts
to install the packages. I didn't check any docs though if that is
configurable, just saying that by default apt-listchanges should
ask whether to continue or not, if there were any NEWS entries it
displayed.
(Also, just concatenating them and feeding them to a pager is not
optimal, because if you have a couple of different systems, and you
upgrade them at the same time, you aren't going to read the same
message twice - but in skimming the output on the second system you
upgrade, you might overlook the NEWS entry for a different package
that wasn't installed on the first one. I don't have a good idea
how to improve that, just saying this is worth thinking about.)
Regards,
Christian
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature