Bug#459427: changelog vs. NEWS handling
Bill Allombert <ballombe@debian.org> writes:
> 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).
A complete changelog is often an appreciable percentage of the size of
that full project history. I'm dubious that, to avoid requiring users
clone the full project history, we should ship the full project history in
Debian packages. Debian does not need to provide every piece of possibly
useful data provided by upstream; at some point, people really should go
directly to upstream for the obscure and marginally useful trivia.
I've stopped including VCS-level changelogs in any of my packages even if
upstream ships them. The compressed changelog was sometimes over 80% of
the size of the entire package, which was a complete waste.
That said, I'm happy to leave this to the Debian package maintainer
discretion in cases where it really is useful for some reason. I think
the most valuable starting point would to be to standardize on
/usr/share/doc/package/NEWS.gz for the human-readable summary and
explicitly say to never install that as
/usr/share/doc/package/changelog.gz. Then, we can define changelog.gz as
always the detailed change-by-change upstream log (if such a thing
exists), and clearly indicate that it's optional and maintainers should
use their discretion in deciding whether it's useful to include, but
should always include the human-readable release notes and change summary
as NEWS.
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.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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