Bug#459427: changelog vs. NEWS handling

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Josh Triplett wrote:
> On Fri, 1 Dec 2017 00:04:20 +0100 Bill Allombert <ballombe@debian.org> wrote:

>> 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.
>
> I sincerely hope so.  Convincing upstreams to "git rm ChangeLog" becomes
> much easier the more widespread existing practice we can point to.
> Having a ChangeLog file in version control is actively detrimental.

I agree with you about GNU-style changelogs.  But I don't think I've
seen those much outside of GNU packages.

How do you feel about generated changelogs in release tarballs that
are generated by tools like "git log"?

> I would go so far as to say that I hope we one day stop shipping
> a non-generated debian/changelog in source packages, because it incurs
> all the same pain.

I've been trying to make debian/changelog in packages I work on
user-focused, and no one has complained yet.

I also use NEWS.Debian for notes about incompatibilities that will
affect sysadmins upgrading.

Thanks,
Jonathan