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

[Allan McRae]

On 24/06/11 01:04, Dan McGee wrote:
> 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.
>

Agreed.  It is not being removed.

As an Arch packager, I have to admit I find changlogs to be a pain to 
maintain.  But that is because I am lazy.  Many other distros enforce 
packagers to write a changelog and it gets done.  So this is an Arch 
issue and not a pacman one.

Feature is staying.
Allan