Bug#459427: changelog vs. NEWS handling
Yuri D'Elia <wavexx@thregr.org> writes:
> In fact, I'd rather have a consistent NEWS location, and shift the focus
> to this release summary instead, while not changing the existing
> changelog rules. It's way more consistent with the best practices
> already seen everywhere in source tarballs.
Yeah, this is basically my opinion too. The changelog (if used in the
original sense as a file like the GNU ChangeLog file) is basically never
useful to me. If I cared that much, I'd probably clone the upstream
repository and start looking through commits with better tools than
parsing a text file. What I actually care about is the NEWS file.
My inclination is to standardize /usr/share/doc/<package>/NEWS.gz (which
is already pretty widely used) and relax the urging to install an upstream
changelog.gz file. I think that's the least disruptive change. Although
an argument could be made for eliminating the suggestion to install an
upstream changelog file entirely and just recommending that NEWS be
installed as changelog.gz, on the grounds that the upstream detailed
changelog is mostly a waste of disk space (and is often huge) and, in the
few times when it is useful, one can just grab the source package and look
at it there.
No matter what we do here, we're going to make a bunch of packages buggy,
because the archive is very divided on current best practice. :(
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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