Package: apt-listchanges Version: 3.5 Severity: wishlist Dear Maintainer,
On a semi-frequent basis - usually when there is an automatic mass binary rebuild on the buildds, in response to a transition against a common dependency package - running a dist-upgrade will result in being shown a flood of changelog entries which are essentially identical, differing only in package name, package version, and entry timestamp. The pattern which such entries usually follow is: * Binary-only non-maintainer upload for [architecture]; no source changes. * Rebuild against [depended-on package]. (At the moment, I am also seeing a mass set of identical entries in an apparently maintainer-initiated update to set of KDE-related packages; a couple of dozen or so packages seem to have been updated simultaneously to the same version, with identical or near-identical changes in each. This sort of issue thus is not exclusive to such automatic rebuilds, it's just most common there.) This mass repetition of identical entries makes it difficult to spot changelog entries for other packages in the middle of the flood - especially since these near-identical entries are often not grouped all together, but scattered around throughout the apt-listchanges report, such that other packages' entries sometimes appear in the middle of a set of the identical entries. I would like to request that there be implemented a mode for apt-listchanges in which, if two changelog entries which are to be reported in a single apt-listchanges run are identical except for package name, package version, and timestamp, the changelog body is only shown once, and the packages and versions (and possibly timestamps) which use that body are listed together next to that single instance. It's fine (and probably best, at least to start with) if this mode is not the default, as long as it can be enabled in an appropriate configuration file, and the way to enable it is documented in the man page. This is, of course, not an urgent request. I regret that I lack sufficient familiarity with the apt-listchanges code (and even the language it's written in) to be comfortable with trying to implement this myself; that may change, but even if it doesn't, I still want to record the existence of the request. -- System Information: Debian Release: stretch/sid APT prefers testing APT policy: (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Foreign Architectures: i386 Kernel: Linux 4.7.0-1-amd64 (SMP w/12 CPU cores) Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash Init: sysvinit (via /sbin/init) Versions of packages apt-listchanges depends on: ii apt 1.3.1 ii debconf [debconf-2.0] 1.5.59 ii debianutils 4.8 ii python3-apt 1.1.0~beta5 pn python3:any <none> ii ucf 3.0036 apt-listchanges recommends no packages. Versions of packages apt-listchanges suggests: ii chromium [www-browser] 53.0.2785.143-1 ii dillo [www-browser] 3.0.5-2+b1 ii elinks [www-browser] 0.12~pre6-11+b3 ii exim4-daemon-light [mail-transport-agent] 4.87-3+b1 ii iceweasel [www-browser] 38.8.0esr-1~deb8u1 ii kterm [x-terminal-emulator] 6.2.0-46.1+b1 ii links [www-browser] 2.13-1 ii lynx [www-browser] 2.8.9dev9-1 ii python3-gi 3.22.0-1 ii w3m [www-browser] 0.5.3-29 ii xterm [x-terminal-emulator] 327-1 -- debconf-show failed
