Hans van Kranenburg wrote: > On 6/5/20 1:34 PM, Ansgar wrote: > > On Fri, 2020-06-05 at 12:09 +0200, Hans van Kranenburg wrote: > > > > Installing NEWS into xen*, but not libxen* probably still > > > > reaches all > > > > relevant users. > > > > > > Yes, that makes sense. > > > > > > OTOH, what if there was a really weird problem with > > > libxenmisc4.11 that > > > we would like to pro-actively inform users about? > > > > In that case shipping NEWS in libxen* would of course be fine in my > > opinion even if it also includes some additional information that > > might > > only be relevant to users of the other NEWS files. > > > > > I guess there is only one NEWS per source package? > > > > You can have `debian/<package>.NEWS` for per-binary NEWS when using > > `dh_installchangelogs` or install them in some other way. But it > > increases overhead and I would personally avoid having per-binary > > NEWS > > for this reason. > > Can you help me by explaining me what your current expectations > regarding this issue are? You ask for not having NEWS in specific > binary packages, but then subsequently explain that you'd prefer to > avoid doing exactly that.
Just include NEWS in relevant packages, not in all; in particular not in lib*. That doesn't require per-binary NEWS as only one identical NEWS file exists. I don't think it is necessary to worry about the hypothetical case of having to inform *all* admins of system that have libxenmisc* installed, but aren't actually using Xen at all, like say every user of qmeu (not all qemu users use Xen, even though qemu-system-x86 links to libxenmisc*). > Adding information to NEWS is quite an exceptional thing to happen. > It's only used for cases in which the user needs to take actions or > needs to be aware of a real problem that needs to be solved outside > of the context of what we can do in the packaging and Debian. My > opinion is that adding the extra complexity is not warranted to fix > the accidental annoyance of pressing a key on the keyboard for a user > who chooses to install apt-listchanges. As Debian build packages generally enabling most compile-time options, many packages end up linked to shared libraries that provide functions not used at all. Users generally don't need to take any action just because a package has optional support for Xen and one shouldn't annoy users in this case: it only results in apt-listchanges getting less useful as it notifies about irrelevant stuff. Debian should try to be user-friendly and only inform users of relevant changes with the NEWS files. Here this can be easily achieved by shipping NEWS.Debian only in xen-utils-common or so (and not in libxen*). Ansgar
