[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: Automatic trimming of changelogs in binary packages



On Fri, 2022-08-19 at 12:44 +0200, Philip Hands wrote:
> Ansgar <ansgar@43-1.org> writes:
> 
> >  - Having to spawn an external command ("dpkg --show-changelog") just
> >    to access a file is more complicated.
> 
> The fact that it currently needs to dug out of the main data archive
> rather than the control archive to show the user changes at install time
> seemed like a decent reason to move it, but that was assuming that the
> file would still end up being visible in the same place in the end.

As far as I understand the metadata proposal, how the changelog is
stored would be a (private) implementation detail of dpkg. It could be
just a file in /var/lib/dpkg/info/${pkg}.changelog, it could be stored
by hash (for deduplication), in a sqlite database, ...

If the goal was just to provide faster access for apt-listchanges and
similar tools, it might be enough to just shuffle the order of files in
data.tar.* so that /usr/share/doc/*/changelog.Debian.* and similar are
the first members. This should even be backwards-compatible.

> If that were not the case then I think it would be more trouble than
> it's worth.

That is my opinion too.

Ansgar


Reply to: