Greetings,
Please note that I am not on the debian-qt-kde list, so please make sure to include me explicitly on replies.
I've recently adopted apt-listchanges, and I'm trying to figure out what to do about bug 962078. Specifically, the submitter complains that every time there are a bunch of KDE package updates, he sees the same changelog messages over and over in apt-listchanges.
Two examples: libkf5crash5 and libkf5dbusaddons5. Here are recent changelog.Debian.gz entry from each of them, compared:
--- libkf5crash5.changelog 2023-10-10 10:46:35.862668849 -0400 +++ libkf5dbusaddons5.changelog 2023-10-10 10:47:00.258828016 -0400 @@ -1,48 +1,49 @@ -kcrash (5.107.0-1) unstable; urgency=medium +kdbusaddons (5.107.0-1) unstable; urgency=medium [ Aurélien COUDERC ] * New upstream release (5.105.0). * Update build-deps and deps with the info from cmake. + * Update symbols from build for 5.105.0. * New upstream release (5.107.0). * Update build-deps and deps with the info from cmake. * Release to unstable. - -- Aurélien COUDERC <coucouf@debian.org> Sun, 18 Jun 2023 16:08:34 +0200 + -- Aurélien COUDERC <coucouf@debian.org> Sun, 18 Jun 2023 16:08:27 +0200 -kcrash (5.104.0-1) experimental; urgency=medium +kdbusaddons (5.104.0-1) experimental; urgency=medium [ Aurélien COUDERC ] * New upstream release (5.104.0). * Update build-deps and deps with the info from cmake. - -- Aurélien COUDERC <coucouf@debian.org> Wed, 15 Mar 2023 16:09:54 +0100 + -- Aurélien COUDERC <coucouf@debian.org> Wed, 15 Mar 2023 16:09:48 +0100 -kcrash (5.103.0-1) unstable; urgency=medium +kdbusaddons (5.103.0-1) unstable; urgency=medium [ Aurélien COUDERC ] * New upstream release (5.103.0). * Update build-deps and deps with the info from cmake. - -- Aurélien COUDERC <coucouf@debian.org> Sun, 12 Feb 2023 21:44:26 +0100 + -- Aurélien COUDERC <coucouf@debian.org> Sun, 12 Feb 2023 21:44:22 +0100
Ignoring the first one, where the content is (slightly) different and therefore apt-listchanges can't really be expected to do anything other than displaying both changelog entries, you can see that the second and third entries here—and many other changelog entries for these packages, as well as other KDE packages—are identical except for a different package name and a slightly different timestamp.
My revamped version of apt-listchanges that is currently in experimental uses two strategies to avoid displaying the same content to users more than once:
These KDE changelog entries just different enough to evade both of these deduplication strategies: their headers have different package names, they're from different source package, and they have slightly different timestamps in their footers.
I could theoretically loosen up the sameness comparison to allow these differences, but honestly, I feel like I'm starting down a slippery slope here which is going to end with apt-listchanges deciding not to display something to the user that in fact should have been displayed.
I'm therefore emailing y'all to make you aware of this issue and ask if there's any room for changing how these packages are built to align the changelog entries better so that it is safer for apt-listchanges to dedup them.
For example, if the timestamps on all of these entries could be made the same, then I could dedup them successfully by allowing deduplication within the same maintainer as well as within the same source package, which would be a little weird but seems like it would be sufficiently cautious to be acceptable. I would really prefer not to have to parse the date and decide, "Welp, these two dates are close enough together to be considered identical," both because I don't want to deal with date-parsing and because I don't want to make arbitrary decisions about what "close enough together" means.
Thanks,
Jonathan Kamens