Bug#459427: changelog vs. NEWS handling
On Thu, Nov 20, 2014 at 09:21:02PM +0100, Jakub Wilk wrote:
> * Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@gmx.net>, 2008-01-06, 14:55:
> >I think that installing a source-level change list is hardly ever
> >useful for a binary package.
>
> It's normally more useful that no changelog at all. :-)
>
> What I tend to do in my packages is:
>
> if user-level change list exists:
> install it as /usr/share/doc/PACKAGE/changelog
> elsif source-level changelog exists:
> install it as /usr/share/doc/PACKAGE/changelog
> else:
> curl into a ball and cry
Agreed.
Upstream changelog are useful when we need to find which version of a package
has such feature (or such bug). If the user-level changelog does not include this
information, but the source-level changelog does, it is nice to ship both.
That being said, splitting between 'user-level changelog' and 'source-level
changelog' is oversimplifying the issue. In practice upstream tarball includes
files which might fit in these categories or not.
In general, we should leave to the package maintainers best judgement to chose
which file to ship as changelog.gz, which files to ship as something else and
which files to omit entirely.
We can provide guideline, but maybe it is more expedient to do that in
devref.
The issue being with use of packaging helper which will pick one file for
changelog.gz without the maintainer having made a conscious choice.
Cheers,
--
Bill. <ballombe@debian.org>
Imagine a large red swirl here.
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