Bug#515601: lintian: false positive changelog-file-not-compressed if corresponding file is small

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Frank Lichtenheld <djpig@debian.org> writes:

> Ok, there are some issues mixed here:
>
> 1) You install the ChangeLog file with dh_installdocs which is a bug
>    in your packaging, since it will already be installed with
>    dh_installchangelogs as changelog.
> 2) lintian complains about the changelog not being compressed but what it
>    really should complain about is the duplicated changelog file, which
>    it would make it clearer that this is your fault ;)

I think the best thing that we can manage here in the short run is to just
not issue a tag for this case, since it's occasionally desirable to have
both ChangeLog and changelog.  (If the maintainer installs NEWS as
changelog, for instance.)  We could potentially decide at a Policy level
that that's not the right thing to do, but we don't really say right now.

http://bugs.debian.org/459427 is relevant here.

Ideally, we'd detect if ChangeLog and changelog were identical and warn
about the duplicate, but I don't see a particularly straightforward way of
doing that other than reading in the entire text of both and comparing it
or forking a diff process or something, none of which feels horribly
appealing.

I think I'm going to fix the false positive and call that good enough for
this bug and we can revisit it later if someone comes up with a good idea
for how to make the test better.

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