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Bug#459427: changelog vs. NEWS handling



Hello,

On Thu, Nov 30 2017, Russ Allbery wrote:

> Unfortunately, there's no good way to do this transition without
> making a whole ton of packages buggy, since we're horribly
> inconsistent about how we handle this now.  I think that's just
> something we should tackle, and make it very clear that this is a
> *minor* bug and people shouldn't harass maintainers about it, but we'd
> like to sort out this historic mess and switch to consistent usage of
> these two files.

We can at least make dh_installchangelogs capable of installing both
changelog.gz and NEWS.gz before we change Policy.  Otherwise, fixing the
minor bugs is significantly more annoying.

On Fri, Dec 01 2017, Ian Jackson wrote:

> Is there some reason why exacdt standardisation of the filenames is
> necessary here ?  For most of the uses I can think of, it is OK to
> look in a handful of files to see which one might answer the question.

Policy does not currently refer to the upstream NEWS/release notes.  I
think it should at least say that such a thing should be installed if it
exists.

Currently, of upstream changelogs, Policy says

    If an upstream changelog is available, it should be accessible as
    /usr/share/doc/package/changelog.gz in plain text.  If the upstream
    changelog is distributed in HTML ...

If we are going to add something that says that upstream NEWS/release
notes should also be installed, why not standardise on the location?  It
seems odd to have a standard location for upstream changelogs but not
for upstream NEWS/release notes.

Or perhaps we should drop the standard location for upstream changelogs.

-- 
Sean Whitton

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