Re: Automatic trimming of changelogs in binary packages
On Fri, 2022-08-19 at 10:35 +0200, Philip Hands wrote:
> P.S. BTW the change Guillem suggests seems like a good idea anyway:
> treating changelogs as control files.
I'm interested: why?
What makes Debian's changelog different from other documentation such
as the upstream changelog, release notes, man pages, ...?
Most things proposed (deduplication, "dpkg --show-changelog" command,
even faster extraction, etc.) can also be implemented with the existing
way of installing them as regular files; the binNMU problem was also
solved 10 years or so ago.
There are however many downsides to special treatment of changelog:
- Upstream and Debian changelog are suddenly in totally different
places. Same for release notes (NEWS.Debian, NEWS). Unless one
makes all of them special data ("dpkg --show-upstream-changelog",
"dpkg --show-upstream-news", ...?).
- It's harder to discover a Debian-specific command than regular
files. And you already might want to look in /usr/share/doc for
other documentation anyway.
- Having to spawn an external command ("dpkg --show-changelog") just
to access a file is more complicated.
Ansgar
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