Re: trimming changelogs

[Ansgar <ansgar@43-1.org>]

Hi,

Adam Borowski writes:
> Of files named changelog.*, top offenders are:

[ Trimmed list to duplicates ]
> 223009 ncurses-bin:changelog.gz
> 223009 ncurses-base:changelog.gz
> 223009 libtinfo6:changelog.gz

> 210621 libc6:changelog.Debian.gz
> 210621 libc-bin:changelog.Debian.gz

> 145889 libapt-pkg6.0:changelog.gz
> 145889 apt:changelog.gz

> 145271 passwd:changelog.gz
> 145271 login:changelog.gz

>  93638 libudev1:changelog.Debian.gz
>  93638 libsystemd0:changelog.Debian.gz

>  63670 logsave:changelog.Debian.gz
>  63670 libss2:changelog.Debian.gz
>  63670 libext2fs2:changelog.Debian.gz
>  63670 libcom-err2:changelog.Debian.gz
>  63670 e2fsprogs:changelog.Debian.gz

We should probably also not ship the same changelog in multiple
packages, especially when one depends on the other.

> Seems like a tempting area to trim...

I agree it would be fine to trim changelogs a bit; no real opinion on
how much to keep (maybe at most three years or so?).  We certainly don't
need 20 years of changelog in any binary package by default in my
opinion.

> On the other hand, changelogs are valuable.  Unlike some folks on IRC
> I wouldn't want to tightly trim all packages.  Unlike minbase or
> prio:important, your average 5GB install doesn't care about a few megs
> here and there.  Thus: do we want to trim manually or globally?

Special cases for packages are annoying, so I would just apply the same
policy for all packages (by default).

Ansgar