Re: finally end single-person maintainership
On Mon, 20 May 2024 at 19:10:00 -0700, Otto Kekäläinen wrote:
> Exact quote: "These commits have intentionally no debian/changelog
> updates as it causes every single rebase or cherry-pick of a commit to
> always have a merge conflict. It is much better to have all commits
> as-is, and then right before upload just run gbp-dch --auto to
> automatically generate the changelog."
This is not unique to Debian packaging: upstream projects that maintain
a GNU-style ChangeLog and/or NEWS file have the same problem, for the
same reasons.
In the projects where I'm an upstream maintainer, we've generally solved
this by having the detailed ChangeLog either auto-generated from `git log`
at release time or not existing at all, and writing a more user-facing
summary of changes into the NEWS file periodically during development
(generally pushed directly by a maintainer rather than going via a merge
request, because adding text to NEWS hopefully can't cause regressions),
and in particular ensuring NEWS is up-to-date as part of the release
procedure (a maintainer/release manager responsibility).
Using `gbp dch` to maintain debian/changelog is analogous to that
technique - the version auto-generated from `git log` acts as a first
draft, and if a contributor wants to adjust the wording used in
debian/changelog to be less about fine-grained technical details and
more user-facing, they can use `gbp dch` to summarize all changes up
to now, make the desired adjustments, `git commit -m 'Update changelog'`
and push. Next time the changelog needs to be updated, `gbp dch` will
start from just after the most recent change that touched
debian/changelog.
smcv
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