Re: BTS and unreleased changelog entries

[Ben Finney <bignose@debian.org>]

Ross Vandegrift <ross@kallisti.us> writes:

> On Sun, Oct 15, 2017 at 12:14:59AM +0200, Mattia Rizzolo wrote:
> > Rather, I have a counter-question for you: why are you keeping
> > entries for unreleased uploads in d/changelog? I find it rather
> > confusing, mostly useless and with no real upsides as opposed to
> > cohalesce the entries.
>
> Good question. I guess I think of a changelog as history - so changes
> I made on 1.15 go with 1.15 whether it was released or not.

Thanks for explaining your perspective.

That perspective, I think, does not match the stated purpose for the
Debian package changelog: to inform *recipients* of the package about
changes between *releases* of that package.

So, a further question: Why did “changes made on 1.15” not simply
continue accumulating changes? You say it was not released; that should
mean the changelog entry is not closed, because a changelog entry
documents a *release* of the Debian package.

> But if I think of the changelog as telling others about changes in a
> release, then it makes sense to squash them.

Yes, that's the purpose specified for the Debian package changelog.

I agree with others that, if you want to document history organised
incompatibly with the Debian changelog, you need ot record that history
somewhere else. For example the VCS commit log, or a ‘debian/HISTORY’
file, or something else.

> Either way, I try to avoid it now. So it's really just dealing with
> the previous entries.

For already-released versions you will need to deal with closing those
bugs manually anyway.

> Sounds like I just need one upload to be done with an early enough -v.
> And then avoid keeping unreleased versions around in the future.

Well, definitely keep them around; just continue editing the
“UNRELEASED” changelog entry, until it's time to make a release. After
that, make a new empty changelog entry for continuing development.

-- 
 \       “Come on, if your religion is so vulnerable that a little bit |
  `\           of disrespect is going to bring it down, it's not worth |
_o__)               believing in, frankly.” —Terry Gilliam, 2005-01-18 |
Ben Finney