Re: Developer names within debian/changelog
On Tuesday 13 May 2008 16:28, Ben Finney wrote:
> All the answers I've had so far indicate that there *is* no
> specification for developer names within a changelog entry, and that
> any format at all is allowed so long as the loose definition in Policy
> is followed.
>
> My issue with that is that it leads to this information being recorded
> in many, mutually-incompatible ways (which was, I believe, the
> existing state when the format was proposed), with no simple guide of
> how one *should* put the information in to be a good Debian citizen.
Ok, so to answer your question: the information was until now only ever
intended to be human-readable. That debchange generated is is a convenience
measure so you don't have to type it, not a way to encode it specifically.
Nearly all of the changelog is currently not machine-parsable, with notable
exclusion of the first and last line (-- author), and the closes: statements.
Everything else, like descriptions of files changed, bugs fixed, translations
updated, release codenames and indeed maintainer names are there only for
humans to read.
If there were a concrete use case to standardising the format of any of them,
of course we could do that. See debian/copyright, that has been freeform for
many years, only when there was a use case for parsing did people start to
standardise it.
If you have this concrete use case, please present it so we can see if it's
worthwhile to require everyone to use the format, or that the current
free-for-all is just as sufficient.
cheers,
Thijs
Reply to: