Hi Rafi,

Am 2014-04-22 08:00, schrieb Rafael Ostertag:
On Mon, Apr 21, 2014 at 10:43:43PM +0100, Maciej (Matchek) Blizi??ski wrote:
2014-04-21 22:26 GMT+01:00 Dagobert Michelsen <[email protected]>:
> I also keep thinking that it
> would be nice to have a dedicated place for the changelog per package in an
> easy-to-parse format (probably in ReST/Markdown?) which could be displayed
> on pkgutil -u (store the previous changelog before removal and diff to the
> newly installed one). Also Catalog changediffs could be generated that way.

I'm not super familiar with the changelog files, but they seem to have
a well defined format, so we should first look if there already are
parsers. So it might be fine to keep the regular changelog format, and
use a parser whenever we want to process the data. Checking if the
changelog syntax is correct can be part of package checking.

There is a parser in cswch (nothing official, I hacked it together), which
tries to be compliant with [1]. So cswch has a pretty good idea of
changelog.CSW and it should be trivial to convert changelog.CSW into any other
format. Let me know what you need.


I also had this idea that instead of using VERSION in the Makefile, we
could take the latest version from changelog:

VERSION = $(call extract_version_from_changelog)

+1

[1] http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-source.html#s-dpkgchangelog

I don't think that is a good idea for two reasons:

1. The application version (e.g. 1.2) is tightly coupled to DISTFILE and
   updated only on version bumps.
2. The REV is calculated from the date which is good IMHO

The Changelog should IMHO contain high-level descriptions of changes, like "Switch from OpenSSL to GnuTLS" accommodated by a date when the change was
done. This may not be related to package rebuilds.
What may be a good idea is to retrieve the REV timestamp from the change log, but again rebuilding may result in binary-different packages with the same
revstamp.

One related thing: It would be nice if we could enable the catalog versions on the webpage and have a "svn diff" button between REVs to show the Makefile
diffs as calculated by OpenGrok.


Best regards

  -- Dago

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