On Thu, Jul 26, 2018 at 08:09:48PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote: > Sean Whitton <spwhit...@spwhitton.name> writes: > > > It's become clear that we do not have consensus on recommending that > > only the release notes be installed, and not also the changelog. > > I'm happy to see this go into Policy, but I find it unfortunate that we're > unwilling to take a stance against this. The source-level ChangeLog is > essentially useless in Debian binary packages, and I've seen packages > waste megabytes (compressed!) of space on it. I'm installing it in one of > my own packages because I felt an obligation to do so because Policy said > I should, and I'm very happy to remove it.
Hello Russ, I am fine with the removal of source-level changelogs, with the provisio that the concept of source-level changelog be clearly defined in policy. This needs to be worded carefully so that maintainers do not start removing user-oriented changelogs that happen to be named 'changelog', 'Changelog', etc. It is also not uncommon for packages to have both a user-oriented changelog and a NEWS file (which is basically the tl;dr of the user-level changelog). In that sense, the latest draft of Sean is a step in the right direction. I might be wrong, but I do not think the majority of upstream changelog are source-level changelog, except for GNU software. Changing debhelper not to install upstream changelog by default will likely create more bugs than it will fix. Cheers, -- Bill. <ballo...@debian.org> Imagine a large red swirl here.