Re: Edit (to improve) old NEWS entry
Hi Nicholas,
On Mon, Apr 14, 2025 at 09:07:36PM -0400, Nicholas D Steeves wrote:
> Lorenzo <plorenzo@disroot.org> writes:
>
> > Hello Mentors,
> >
> > a user reported that some NEWS entries I wrote recently are hard to
> > understand and suggested few improvements.
> > Is it allowed to edit old NEWS entries, at the benefit of users
> > upgrading from Bookworm to Trixie?
> > (unstable/testing users won't see the edited NEWS)
>
> I'm not aware of any prohibition against this, and there's at least one
> reason why your motivation to improve NEWS entries for Bookworm2Trixie
> upgrades is something commendable:
>
> Debian is for its users; NEWS interrupts upgrades; if NEWS is not
> important, or if it isn't useful, then that NEWS wastes an unbounded
> number of users' time. Consequently, NEWS should be important, and NEWS
> should not taste users' time.
>
> So thank you! :) Doing this ahead of time, defensively, produces the
> situation where no news is good news.
>
> Oh, but please update (or allow your editor to update) the date stamp on
> the relevant NEWS entries. They look something like this:
>
> -- You Name <your@email.org> Mon, 14 Apr 2025 18:06:58 $timezone
I passed on this advice to a maintainer who was consolidating two
entries where the second one superseded the first but to my surprise the
new consolidated entry was presented again on package upgrade due to the
timestamp even though the relevant version had been kept (at the later
of the two relevant versions).
Is this what you would expect? It doesn't seem optimal to use the
timestamp rather than the package version to decide what to present.
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