Quoting Florian Schlichting (2018-07-01 17:23:04) > Hi, > > On Sun, Jul 01, 2018 at 11:37:21AM +0200, Mattia Rizzolo wrote: > > On Sun, Jul 01, 2018 at 12:39:47PM +0800, Paul Wise wrote: > > > I recently saw a changelog entry (quoted below) for a Perl team > > > package where several contributors to that version had their names > > > mentioned multiple times with one or more changes below each > > > instance of their name. This made the changelog harder to read. I > > > think it would be useful for lintian to emit a pedantic or > > > info-level warning for duplicate contributor information in the > > > latest changelog entry. > > > > I personally agree with you here, but apparently not everybody does. > > ISTR to remember in the past suggesting to change the default of dch > > --multimaint-merge but somebody complained that that way it would > > lose the chronological order of the changes or something like that > > (I don't really buy it). > > I'm probably guilty of uploading a fair number of packages with such > changelogs over the last few days, as I'm working through a list of > perl team packages that haven't had an upload in over six years and > thus still point to SVN with their version in the archive. > > Most of those changelog entries stem from (semi-)automatic mass > commits made over the years to our several thousand packages; and some > of them change the very same thing a previous entry modified. In the > example that Paul cited, Ansgar first changed the Vcs-* lines from > svn.d.o to git.d.o in 2011, then Salvatore changed git.d.o to > anonscm.d.o in 2013, git:// to https:// in 2016, and anonscm.d.o to > salsa.d.o in 2018, each time adding a commit with the change and one > that modified d/changelog using dch. If that last commit was made by > Ansgar again, wouldn't --multimaint-merge result in a confusing > changelog that lists final modifications before intermediate ones? > > Having said that, I don't have a strong feeling about how changelogs > should look like, other than that the default behaviour of our tools > should agree with what lintian wants to see. In my use of d/changelog, > both as a packager and occasionally as a user looking at an installed > package, it's a mirror of the packaging repository's git history, very > likely auto-generated, and a bit redundant as a source of > information... Lintian not complaining is not the same as lintian wanting us to tune tools for (in our opinion) improved readability. I find it more readable to list each contributor only once. Also (not exactly same but strongly related): I find it irrelevant¹ to list changes reverted or shadowed later within same release: Please cleanup auto-generated changelog, stripping parts not ending in the final package release. - Jonas ¹ I thought Debian Policy had a passage that changelog should cover user-facing changes, but cannot find it now so maybe I imagined that. -- * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt * Tlf.: +45 40843136 Website: http://dr.jones.dk/ [x] quote me freely [ ] ask before reusing [ ] keep private
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