Bug#459427: changelog vs. NEWS handling
On Thu, Nov 30, 2017 at 08:45:51PM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
> 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.
> 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.
I agree with your point about VCS-level changelog, however projects that
ship a VCS-changelog masquaraded as a true changelog are a minority.
A true changelog is much smaller than the VCS changelog.
Also some project split the changelog by major version, so one can only
include the changelog of the two last major version if space is a
concern.
> 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.
Some package include a changelog file that you would call a NEWS file
while also including a NEWS file.
Mayabe policy could say: "do not include the changelog if it is actually
a VCS dump, in that case ship the NEWS file as changelog".
Cheers,
--
Bill. <ballombe@debian.org>
Imagine a large red swirl here.
Reply to: