Bug#459427: changelog vs. NEWS handling
As others have said, running 'git log' is far more useful than a
complete changelog and in my experience, most projects these days
outside of GNU don't bother shipping changelogs.
Most of my Debian and Ubuntu work involves GNOME packaging. For the
most part, GNOME components ships NEWS files which are much more
interesting for users or developers to read for highlights of what
changed when.
Ubuntu took the position 7 years ago that shipping full upstream
changelogs is a waste of space. [1] This whole situation introduces a
bad problem: for the hundreds of packages that use
'dh_installchangelogs NEWS', [2] Ubuntu silently drops the NEWS file
(renamed as changelog.gz)!
I believe Policy's advice to install upstream changelogs should be
dropped. In its place, I think a recommendation to ship NEWS files in
/usr/share/doc/ would be useful. Notably, debhelper does not currently
install NEWS files unless explicitly told to.[3]
I think the new recommendation would do some good, because debhelper
apparently isn't installing NEWS by default because of this unresolved
bug and because Policy doesn't say it should. [4] But it seems like it
would be less boilerplate and less mistakes if the NEWS files would
just be installed automatically (maybe in debhelper compat 12).
I think the idea of renaming NEWS to changelog (as is done by
dh_installchangelogs NEWS) is wrong, because it goes against people's
understanding of what a changelog generally looks like. I think the
idea of a NEWS file is fairly well understood in open source
development.
[1] https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/debhelper/7.4.20ubuntu2
[2] https://codesearch.debian.net/search?q=dh_installchangelogs.*NEWS
[3] Many more packages use dh_Installdocs for this than dh_installchangelogs:
https://codesearch.debian.net/search?q=path%3Adebian%2F.*docs+NEWS
https://codesearch.debian.net/search?q=dh_installdocs.*NEWS
By the way, CDBS does install NEWS by default.
[4] https://bugs.debian.org/666056
Thanks,
Jeremy Bicha
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