Bug#96597: changing policy requirements for debian native packages to _MUST_
On Mon, Mar 04, 2002 at 10:38:15PM -0500, Joey Hess wrote:
> The method of finding a package's changelog that I had always assumed
> would be used is:
>
> if (the package is native via dpkg)
> return /usr/share/doc/package/changelog.gz
> else
> return /usr/share/doc/package/changelog.Debian.gz
Unfortunately, this doesn't work. Check out
/usr/share/doc/dpkg/changelog{,.Debian}.gz.
> I have no idea what methods the current set of tools that search out
> debian changelogs use, and I would be leery of breaking them by changing
> policy, if they do happen to use the technique I'd assumed they'd use.
>
> It looks like apt-listchanges for one does look for both changelogs, at
> the expense of running dpkg-deb --fsys-tarfile twice for native
> packages. Note that in this case if it could be assured of my method
> working, it could be sped up since it already knows the version number
> of the package.
I went over and over this in the early days of apt-listchanges, because
there were so many corner cases that had to be covered (consider a package
which includes the upstream changelog as changelog.gz, but depends on
another package to provide changelog.Debian.gz). I hate the way it has to
be done now, and I would gladly embrace a new policy which would put the
changelog in one place all the time, or at least one that can be determined
without reading through the tarball. Personally, I think it would be a good
idea to require every binary package to include a copy of the changelog with
a static filename. Otherwise, you can't necessarily get the up-to-date
changelog from it, even if it is installable (doesn't have a versioned
dependency on the package providing the real changelog).
--
- mdz
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