On 07/02/14 18:39, Jerome Leclanche wrote: > Hi list > > The subject came up at FOSDEM on a packaging discussion. I thought > it'd be worth bringing up here. > Pacman has extremely basic and non-advertised support for changelogs. > These are maintainer changelogs, not upstream changelogs, and seem to > be completely useless. In fact, in my 900~ package install, only iotop > and zsh-syntax-highlighting have a changelog at all and they all list > "Updated to release ...".
Pacman also has "unadvertised" delta support. No need to remove it because it is not used... > My personal recommendation, and what makes the most sense, is to allow > for (and highly recommend) upstream changelogs. If there is a > changelog file, that can be displayed in pacman -Qc (regardless of its > format). > There is also the subject of online-only changelogs. Should they be > downloaded, or should -Qc display "Read the changelog at http://...";? > My first thought is that's up to the packager/maintainer, they would > know better on a per-package basis. I'll just point out as an Arch dev and not a pacman one, that Arch will probably never include a ChangeLog in their packages. Extra maintenance burden like this is generally seen as unnecessary. > Debian is really good with its packaging changelogs. Afaik they're the > only distro that properly uses them. They're a lot less relevant to > arch linux due to the very nature of the distro ("trust upstream") but > I don't think they're useless; in fact, we should probably distinguish > packaging and upstream changelogs. Looking at Debian. They supply a packaging changelog exactly like what is available in pacman (viewed by dch -v version-revision or dch -i). So the advantage there is that they can just display the appropriate part of the ChangeLog file. I guess that requires the file format to be quite strict. Debian also puts that upstream ChangeLog/NEWS etc in /usr/share/doc/package. Again, this is nothing that can not be done in makepkg already, and is a distribution policy matter. Lets look at rpm. rpm -q --changelog <pkg> displays the packaging changelog. I'm not sure that they have an option to display the changes in a given version only. Including upstream changelogs is a distributional decision. In conclusion, we have the same support for ChangeLog that every other package manager has. And I am convinced that the changelog for the package is the changelog a package manager should display. Whether to include a packaging changelog at all and what format it is in is a distribution decision. Whether to also include an upstream development changelog in the package is also a distributional decision. I see nothing that needs changed in makepkg/pacman. Allan
