I would like to point out that people ASSUMED I meant that pacman would cull through the PKGBUILDs *if* the change info was added at the end of same.
That is an assumption and is *NOT* necessarily correct. Pacman does *not* have to be the info culling mechanism. Personally a simple bash script can handle that chore, and was what I was planning to use. Since I keep abs up-to-date, this would allow me a fast way to get the info. It also would not require accessing the wan to perform the cull. Additionally it would not require the PKGBUILD author to add his comments separately to a cvs or another file and or system. Again, very best regards; Bob Finch > I would say that informing the user community as to the reason a package > is updated is a needed feature. Every distribution I can think of has a > changelog for packages. Most have security update channels of some form > or another. Be it mailing list, rss feed, or something. > > I made no distinction that this should be included as a feature of > pacman. It just needs to be done in some way. I don't see why people are > automatically trying to bolt this onto pacman... > > Ravi Desai wrote: >> And for those users who wish to know the cvs changes, set up a >> (automated?) cvs mailing list or something. The majority of the users >> really don't need this, and again, it's not the job of the package >> manager. > > I would say that it IS the job of a package maintainer to know why they > are updating a package, and to provide a means to letting people know > why they did it. Be it a somewhate meaningful cvs changelog, or an email > to a mailing list. Just...anything.. > >> If someone /really/ needs to know the reasons, they should >> either mail the packager or (preferably) check out the cvs commit >> mailing list archives. > > So, having the package maintainer provide a one time, quick and easy, > information outflow path, is somehow worse than 100s of users each > requesting information individually? Or are you saying that people > should not have easy access to reasoning why packages are updated? I > think making users paw through the cvs repository changelogs themselves > is baroque to say the least. And having everyone contact the maintainers > directly is even worse. > >> On the other hand, it can be argued that adding such a thing is >> only >> some text, and could be put in an array (like depends) and it could be >> made possible to view this explanation for upgrade through 'pacman >> -Qi'. > > Again, keep it out of pacman. Just provide SOME mechanism for easy > access to a changelog information. The main website provides a list of > recently changed packages. The addition of information as to why the > package changed should be a logical progression. > > I am honestly dumbfounded that this is an arguable topic. In the scheme > of things, adding a little text to a cvs commit, or some similarly > minute mechanism, doesn't seem terribly difficult. > > > -- > -------------------------- > Bender: It was horrible! A nightmare! > Fry: What happened? > Bender: I dreamt I was in a place of 0's and 1's and all of a sudden... > I saw a two *whimper* > Fry: It's ok Bender, don't worry. There's no such thing as 2's. > > _______________________________________________ > arch mailing list > [email protected] > http://www.archlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/arch _______________________________________________ arch mailing list [email protected] http://www.archlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/arch
