Re: changelog vs ChangeLog and policy dictates
On Sat, 11 Apr 1998, Juan Cespedes wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 11, 1998 at 04:36:14PM -0400, Dale Scheetz wrote:
> > I am not on the policy mailing list, so please cc me on this thread.
> >
> > Does/Should the policy manual detail which letters may, or may not, be
> > upper or lower case?
>
> I think so.
I know ;-)
>
> > Is such a "violation" of policy a bug that should get higher severity than
> > wishlist?
>
> Definition of "wishlist", by Ian Jackson:
> "any feature request, and also any bugs that are very difficult to
> fix due to major design considerations."
>
> IMHO, it's not a wishlist bug. It's against our Policy,
> and it's easy to fix.
>
Ease of the fix is not disputed. I just don't use such things as
validation criterion. Just because something has an easy fix, doesn't
make the fix the right thing to do.
Is it useful? Does is serve some purpose? (The only one I've heard is
uniformity...something I want to talk about farther down.)
What it does, from my point of view as a developer, is to add unnecessary
clutter to what was, previously, a straightforward deal.
> > In defense of violating this policy:
> >
> > Upper/Lower case lettering does not confuse the average reader.
>
> But it confuses many automatic readers. I have several tools
> to get information from a .deb extracting its /usr/doc/*/copyright,
> /usr/doc/*/changelog.gz and /usr/doc/*/changelog.Debian.gz.
>
Is there some reason that these "automatic readers" can't "tolower" the
input and check the string against totally lowercase reference strings?
BTW, you called for consistancy but don't see anything inconsistant about
changelog.Debian.gz?
I believe that a specification that only requires that files be spelled in
a particular fashion is more reasonable to the reality of the upstream
sources off of which we feed. Making constant changes to that source, just
to suit a trivial issue.
It was mentioned above that automatic software has problems with this. I
remember that I went through this with a script I wrote to parse the
packages file. Dpkg is perfectly happy with PACKAGE:, Package:, or
package: as the header for a package entry. To make the script function in
that environment I made every buffer that was used for comparisons, get
built with "tolower".
Why are we trying to be more strict than that here?
> > The upstream source uses the ChangeLog style in the original source.
>
> I'm not saying that I prefer "changelog". I'm only saying
> that we should be consistent.
>
Consistent with what? I prefer consistency with upstream source. You seem
to want a "rule" of consistency to avoid writing a few lines of code in
an "auto something" program. Better to make a whole bunch of folks write a
few more lines of code in the rules files of their packages.
> > I find the typology of ChangeLog much easier to read than changelog. They
> > parse the same for me, and it is the fact that they don't parse the same
> > for *nix systems that allows them to be of such value, even in this small
> > case.
>
> I agree, but there is a problem here: our policy says it
> should be "changelog.gz", and lots of our packages follow it. I think
> it's better to use all lower cas than to change our policy, and lots
> of packages.
>
No packages need change if the Policy is relaxed so that it is interpreted
as "case indepentent spelling" is specified by the the requirement that
the upstream changlog be named changelog in a strictly lower case
interpretation.
In addition, while it is relatively easy to change the way a line in the
rules file acts, if the files, whose names are covered by such policy
statements, are installed by the make file, then the changes become more
difficult, more so when the package is built using a config method.
I guess that I see no reason why policy on names should, necessarily,
demand case identity, and certainly not in this kind of situation.
Waiting is,
Dwarf
--
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