[pacman-dev] Discussion about deprecating/removing the changelog feature from pacman.

[Marc - A. Dahlhaus]

Am 23.06.2011 17:04, schrieb Dan McGee:
> On Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 9:30 AM, Sven-Hendrik Haase <sh at lutzhaase.com> wrote:
>> On 06/23/2011 04:19 PM, Thomas Dziedzic wrote:
>>>
>>> I would like to bring up a point which has been annoying me for a while
>>> and
>>> I would like to get it out there.
>>>
>>> I will argue that the changelog feature is unnecessary in
>>> pacman/PKGBUILDs.
>>>
>>> 1.) It's a feature rarely used by anyone, e.g. there are changelogs which
>>> exist which haven't been updated in years which I encounter and remove
>>> right
>>> away.
>>>
>>> 2.)Svn log usually serves the same purpose, and I can not think of any
>>> benefits changelogs provide over svn log.
>>>
>>> 3.)I can not think of one package I have encountered that included a
>>> useful
>>> changelog.
>>>
>>> Some ways to go about removing it are:
>>> declare deprecated ->  remove after some time
>>> or just remove changelog support right away
>>> The last option might be viable given its small audience.
>>>
>> +1 for all the reasons you stated.
>>
>> I favor removing changelog right away.
> 
> So confused. Should we remove deltas too? And support for bz2/xz
> packages and databases?
> 
> Why on earth would we remove a feature that someone might use, even if
> Arch is not making extensive use of it? This is incredibly
> shortsighted.

I second Dan's opinion here. => NAK

We use changelogs quite extensively, and all should keep in mind that

pacman -Qc PACKAGENAME

will help any user that doesn't need to know where your PKGBUILD tree is
managed / tracked / whatever...

I would suggest that makepkg should be extended to have a way to add the
output of a command (e.g. "svn log") as changelog to a package...

That would make the life easier for any maintainer and would solve the
problem even for the lazy arch package maintainers... :-P

Thanks,

Marc