Re: original package changelogs

[Ben Finney <ben+debian@benfinney.id.au>]

Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> writes:

> I think NEWS is far and away the more useful of the two files. Usually
> the full changelog has an overwhelming amount of detail and isn't
> horribly useful at answering users' questions.

How would you relate this valuation against the Lintian checks? Should
Lintian care less about an upstream ChangeLog file, and more about an
upstream NEWS file?

Where should this distinction (which it seems there is some agreement
on) be made clear to Debian package maintainers?

> All of the packages for which I'm both upstream and the Debian packager
> have no traditional ChangeLog file, only NEWS, and install the upstream
> NEWS file as /usr/share/doc/<package>/changelog.gz.

Perhaps that could be made clear; it's surely an obvious conclusion (but
wrong, by your assessment) that the upstream ChangeLog should be used
for that purpose.

Indeed, that's what ‘dh_installchangelogs(1)’ will do:

    If there is an upstream changelog file, it will be be installed as
    usr/share/doc/package/changelog in the package build directory.

Do you advocate a change to this behaviour? What, exactly?

-- 
 \       “My classmates would copulate with anything that moved, but I |
  `\               never saw any reason to limit myself.” —Emo Philips |
_o__)                                                                  |
Ben Finney