On Wed, 29 Nov 2017 11:34:21 +0000, Simon McVittie wrote:
> > 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.
> This is in line with the roles of NEWS and ChangeLog in the GNU Coding
> Standards, which is perhaps a more canonical reference than "what
> GNOME does".
From the Perl world, looking at roughly ~3400 packages I have locally
cloned:
28 have a NEWS file (most of them with a Gnome/GTK background), 1
News, 1 news.
3368 have a Changes, CHANGES, Changelog, ChangeLog, (and some other
variations like Change{s,Log}.{pod,ini,1,txt}); and those files are the
manually created user-facing summaries of relevant changes of the
release (in almost all cases).
For 10 packages we have `dh_installchangelogs NEWS' in debian/rules.
I'm all for installing NEWS if it's a summary in the GNU style; but
assuming that ChangeLog etc. are detailed/auto-generated/boring
doesn't reflect reality in the Perl universe.
> > 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.
> At the risk of making more packages immediately buggy, I think I agree
> with this, and hence prefer option 2 over option 3.
I think that depends on where the people are coming from; if they've
used Debian for long enough they might be familiar with the practice
that /usr/share/doc/<package>/changelog.gz contains user-focused
summaries. -- But I'm fine with installing NEWS as
/usr/share/doc/<package>/NEWS.gz instead of renaming it when it
exists.
Cheers,
gregor
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