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Bug#436716: W: changelog-file-not-compressed changelog should not be displayed if changelog is a symlink



Reinhard Tartler <siretart@tauware.de> writes:

> Package: lintian
> Version: 1.23.32ubuntu1
> Severity: normal

> Consider the package smake. [1] It has the warning "W:
> changelog-file-not-compressed changelog". The changelog is a symlink to
> an 'announcement file'.

> I think the warning should be omitted if the file 'changelog' is
> actually a symlink. Do you agree here?

No, see section 12.7 of Debian Policy:

    If an upstream changelog is available, it should be accessible as
    /usr/share/doc/package/changelog.gz in plain text. If the upstream
    changelog is distributed in HTML, it should be made available in that
    form as /usr/share/doc/package/changelog.html.gz and a plain text
    changelog.gz should be generated from it using, for example, lynx
    -dump -nolist. If the upstream changelog files do not already conform
    to this naming convention, then this may be achieved either by
    renaming the files, or by adding a symbolic link, at the maintainer's
    discretion.[83]

    All of these files should be installed compressed using gzip -9, as
    they will become large with time even if they start out small.

I think this is completely unambiguous and there's no exception for
symlinks despite symlinks being specifically mentioned.  I don't see any
reason why the announcement file should not be compressed, and if it's
not, it's either not accessible via /usr/share/doc/package/changelog.gz
or there's a file with a .gz extension that isn't actually compressed,
which is likely to confuse matters.

Consistency across packages seems more important here to me than saving
some minor effort by not bothering to compress some small files.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>



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