[pacman-dev] Discussion on changelogs

[Emil Lundberg]

If upstream changelogs become supported, I have a patch for makepkg to
allow a changelog() function in PKGBUILD to generate the changelog at
packaging time (from VCS messages, for instance). Let me know if it
becomes relevant, or if a task comes up where I can post it.

/Emil

On Fri, Feb 7, 2014 at 6:59 PM, Karol Blazewicz
<karol.blazewicz at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>>
>