Package: debian-policy Version: 4.1.1.1 Severity: normal Section 4.4 explains quite a bit about debian/changelog, but doesn't really explain its purpose. I took its purpose to be recording history and driving automation - which led to some mistakes that might've been avoided. During a recent thread on mentors [1], I learned that the purpose is to provide a human readable list of changes between released versions of Debian. This came as a surprise.
I'm not sure how this should be worded best, but I found a number of the comments on the thread to be helpful, especially [2]. Thanks, Ross [1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-mentors/2017/10/msg00145.html [2] https://lists.debian.org/debian-mentors/2017/10/msg00178.html -- System Information: Debian Release: 9.1 APT prefers stable APT policy: (500, 'stable'), (40, 'unstable'), (30, 'experimental') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Kernel: Linux 4.9.0-4-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores) Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system) Versions of packages debian-policy depends on: ii libjs-sphinxdoc 1.4.9-2 debian-policy recommends no packages. Versions of packages debian-policy suggests: pn doc-base <none>