[pacman-dev] Discussion on changelogs

[Jerome Leclanche]

On Sun, Feb 9, 2014 at 1:02 AM, Allan McRae <allan at archlinux.org> wrote:
> In conclusion, we have the same support for ChangeLog that every other
> package manager has.  And I am convinced that the changelog for the
> package is the changelog a package manager should display.
>
> Whether to include a packaging changelog at all and what format it is in
> is a distribution decision.  Whether to also include an upstream
> development changelog in the package is also a distributional decision.
>
> I see nothing that needs changed in makepkg/pacman.

Yeah - I wasn't arguing the current changelog feature needed to be
removed. I was however arguing that we may want to be able to include
upstream changelogs as well in the package. It's fair if arch devs
don't do it for whatever reason, but usually it's just a matter of
adding a single line to the PKGBUILD, once so it's a perfectly
scalable burden, so to say. Packaging changelogs however are a massive
maintenance burden as they need to be updated every release.
So currently, pacman supports a feature nobody uses, and doesn't
support a "fire and forget" feature that applies to thousands of
packages.

J. Leclanche