Bug#459427: changelog vs. NEWS handling

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Hi,

gregor herrmann wrote:

> 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.

Yes.

Some more questions from a policy pov:

 1. What to do with packages that make multiple per-release release
    note files?  Should the packager concatenate them or is shipping
    them as multiple files ok?  (E.g. see /usr/share/doc/git/RelNotes.)

 2. What about packages that prune old release notes from their source
    tarball?  (E.g. Samba's WHATSNEW.TXT doesn't go back very far,
    sometimes not even as far as the previous stable Debian release.)

    Should packagers copy back in such archived release notes to make
    the changelog usable to users?

 3. Any advice for packagers to make complying with the GPL section 5+6
    straightforward?

      a) The work must carry prominent notices stating that you modified
      it, and giving a relevant date.

    What about when Debian's upstream is downstream from someone else?

Thanks,
Jonathan