Re: Alternative names in upstream changelogs
Steve Greenland wrote:
> Debian policy requires that the upstream changelog be accessible as
> /usr/share/doc/<package>/changelog.gz. Some (many?) authors use an
> alternative name for their changelog, with "CHANGES" seeming to be the
> most popular. What is the appropriate thing to do?
Note that I considered this some when adding the -k flag to
dh_installchangelogs.
> 1. Copy to changelog and compress?
Fine if you don't care about preserving the name. It can be important to
preserve the name if some other document refers to CHANGES, or if
you think the upstream author might refer to the CHANGES sometime or
be annoyed that you renamed it.
I don't think something should go in policy that outlaws this option
and mandates on of the below options.
> 2a. Copy as CHANGES, compress, and 'ln -s CHANGES.gz changelog.gz'?
This has the bad property of not letting you pull
usr/share/doc/<package>/changelog.gz out of a .deb and actually get the
changelog. Getting a symlink instead isn't very nice. One reason to want
a single standard changelog name is so it can be automatically
extracted, similar to the copyright file.
> 2b. Copy as changelog, compress, and 'ln -s changelog.gz CHANGES.gz'?
This is the method I chose to implement in debhelper, in the lack on
any policy on the subject.
> 3. Copy as CHANGES, compress, and copy to changelog.gz?
I don't understand how this is different than 5 or 6 (one or the other,
not both; what you're saying is unclear to me).
> 4. Copy as CHANGES, copy to changelog, and compress both?
> 5. Copy as CHANGES, copy to changelog, and compress only changelog?
> 6. Copy as CHANGES, compress, and ignore policy?
>
> Obviously, 3-6 are wrong, but all of the above seem to have been done
> by at least one package installed on my system. FWIW, 2a seems the most
> popular in my small sample.
Wow, that is very suprising, I would have expected 2b to be more popular
since debhelper does it that way.
Anyway, populatiry isn't a good criteria. If a lot of packages are doing
a lot of different things here, I guess there is a reason to pick one
and put it in policy that if you're going to somehow preserve the
upstream changelog name, you have to do it in a particular way.
Especially since 3-6 are so broken.
> Or should I just stop worrying about trivial crap like this?
Never! Perfectionists of the world untie! ;-)
--
see shy jo
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