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Bug#681289: debian-policy: Changelog and copyright should be package metadata



Package: debian-policy
Severity: wishlist
User: debian-dpkg@lists.debian.org
Usertags: changelog

Both the changelog and the copyright files are stored with a package's
normal data (within data.tar in the .deb) but they are really package
metadata (that should be part of control.tar in the .deb).

All the tools and services that currently extract both of those files
(packages.d.o, apt-listhanges, etc.) would benefit from being able to
extract them with the rest of the package metadata.

Additionnaly it also solves a problem that we have with multi-arch same
packages and bin-nmu. Such a bin-nmu means that the changelog on the
bin-nmued architecture will be different from the other arches and the
package is thus no longer co-installable.

We should thus modify the policy to say:

1/ that the changelog and copyright files ought to be installed in the
   DEBIAN directory along with the other control files

   (this will require changes in dh_installdocs and dh_installchangelogs)

2/ that programs that want to retrieve the changelog and/or copyright file
   of an installed package should try to use "dpkg-query --control-show <pkg>
   <changelog|copyrigh>" and fall back to the usual path if that fails.

   Those interfaces are available in wheezy's dpkg (>= 1.16.5).

3/ that programs that want to retrieve the changelog and/or copyright file
   of a .deb file should use dpkg-deb -I <file> <changelog|copyrigh>" (or
   look for the changelog/copyright file in the directory extracted
   with dpkg-deb -e <file>)

This should probably be included in a new major revision of the policy
(4.0 that you wanted to do shortly after wheezy's release?).

QUESTION: Shall we design some solution to ensure that
/usr/share/doc/<pkg>/{changelog.Debian.gz,copyright} are kept during the
transition period ?

If yes, we need to think of a solution that doesn't involve as much pain
as was the /usr/doc transition (i.e. we want a single tool that does it for
all packages rather than a maintainer script snippet in all packages).

-- System Information:
Debian Release: wheezy/sid
  APT prefers stable-updates
  APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'proposed-updates'), (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable'), (150, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: amd64

Kernel: Linux 3.4-trunk-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=fr_FR.utf8, LC_CTYPE=fr_FR.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash



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