[pacman-dev] Discussion on changelogs

[Karol Blazewicz]

On Fri, Feb 7, 2014 at 9:39 AM, Jerome Leclanche <adys.wh at 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?h=packages/volwheel
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
>