On 01-May-00, 00:38 (CDT), Joey Hess <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Steve Greenland wrote: > > Debian policy requires that the upstream changelog be accessible as > > /usr/share/doc/<package>/changelog.gz. Some (many?) authors use an > > alternative name for their changelog, with "CHANGES" seeming to be the > > most popular. What is the appropriate thing to do? > > Note that I considered this some when adding the -k flag to > dh_installchangelogs. > > > 1. Copy to changelog and compress? > > Fine if you don't care about preserving the name. It can be important to > preserve the name if some other document refers to CHANGES, or if > you think the upstream author might refer to the CHANGES sometime or > be annoyed that you renamed it. > > I don't think something should go in policy that outlaws this option > and mandates on of the below options.
Would expand a little on this? You seem to disaprove of not providing the change log under its original name (modulo .gz) (and I agree), but then don't think policy should forbid it, and more to the point, the default of dh_installchangelogs isn't '-k'. > > 2a. Copy as CHANGES, compress, and 'ln -s CHANGES.gz changelog.gz'? > > This has the bad property of not letting you pull > usr/share/doc/<package>/changelog.gz out of a .deb and actually get the > changelog. Getting a symlink instead isn't very nice. One reason to want > a single standard changelog name is so it can be automatically > extracted, similar to the copyright file. Ahh, this may explain why the www.debian.org package browser sometimes fails to come up with a changelog. > > 3. Copy as CHANGES, compress, and copy to changelog.gz? > > I don't understand how this is different than 5 or 6 (one or the other, > not both; what you're saying is unclear to me). > > > 4. Copy as CHANGES, copy to changelog, and compress both? > > 5. Copy as CHANGES, copy to changelog, and compress only changelog? > > 6. Copy as CHANGES, compress, and ignore policy? The difference (of 3) from 4 is that the compressed files are not identical (see /usr/share/doc/jdk1.1, lprng). The difference from 5 is that only changelog.gz is compressed; CHANGES is not (see /usr/share/doc/groovycd). The difference from 6 is that there is no changelog.gz -- a policy violation (bash!). > Wow, that is very suprising, I would have expected 2b to be more popular > since debhelper does it that way. Notice "small sample", there are 12 packages on my system with a file in the doc/foo directory beginning with "CHANG". I was somewhat stunned to find 7 different ways of dealing with it. Given the variety, I think I will propose an ammendment. Thanks, Steve
