Bug#459427: changelog vs. NEWS handling
On Tue, Nov 28, 2017 at 11:01:08PM -0500, Jeremy Bicha wrote:
> 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 disagree with removing this requirement.
Both the content and the name of the upstream changelogs is an upstream
issue. The fact that a file is named by upstream Changelog instead of
NEWS does not imply anything on its usefulness. It might even happen
that NEWS is the real changelog.
The fact that some upstream do not bother to ship useful changelog does
not mean that all changelog are useless, and by removing them we
discourage upstream of producing useful changelog.
git log might be more useful in some situation and extremly inconvenient
in some others (to start with it require network access and cloning
the full project history).
The ability to extract upstream changelog from .deb is useful.
Cheers,
--
Bill. <ballombe@debian.org>
Imagine a large red swirl here.
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