On Fri, Feb 7, 2014 at 9:39 AM, Jerome Leclanche <adys.wh@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi list
The subject came up at FOSDEM on a packaging discussion. I thought it'd be worth bringing up here. Pacman has extremely basic and non-advertised support for changelogs. These are maintainer changelogs, not upstream changelogs, and seem to be completely useless. In fact, in my 900~ package install, only iotop and zsh-syntax-highlighting have a changelog at all and they all list "Updated to release ...".
Many packages that ship them, don't have an up to date changelog e.g. https://projects.archlinux.org/svntogit/community.git/plain/trunk/ChangeLog?... The consensus is (or at least was half a year ago) that such changelogs should be removed https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/37105
My personal recommendation, and what makes the most sense, is to allow for (and highly recommend) upstream changelogs. If there is a changelog file, that can be displayed in pacman -Qc (regardless of its format). There is also the subject of online-only changelogs. Should they be downloaded, or should -Qc display "Read the changelog at http://..."? My first thought is that's up to the packager/maintainer, they would know better on a per-package basis.
There's https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/33960
Debian is really good with its packaging changelogs. Afaik they're the only distro that properly uses them. They're a lot less relevant to arch linux due to the very nature of the distro ("trust upstream") but I don't think they're useless; in fact, we should probably distinguish packaging and upstream changelogs. Final question is, what of the syntax? I have a few things in mind but I'd like to hear whether such changes would be welcome at all first.
Cheers
J. Leclanche