Thanks to Matt Zimmerman and Joe Drew, apt-listchanges will now display NEWS.Debian entries for upgraded packages. They're displayed before the regular changelog entries, and Matt plans to later let it be configured to only display news, if the user wants (more useful for stable users).
The NEWS.Debian file is installed as /usr/share/doc/<package>/NEWS.Debian.gz. Always compressed, always with that name even in native packages. If you use debhelper, upgrade to 4.1.51 and dh_installchangelogs will install debian/NEWS files for you[1]. The file format is the same as a debian changelog file, but we leave off the asterisks generally, and use bigger paragraphs explaining news items when necessary. It might be a good idea to run your file through dpkg-parsechangelog to check its formatting as it will not be automatically checked during build as the changelog is. I expect there will be a lintian check eventually. Here's a real life example of a NEWS.Debian file: libinline-perl (0.43-5) unstable; urgency=low Note that when you upgrade from perl 5.6 to 5.8, binaries built with libinline (this may include compiled objects cached in .Inline/_Inline directories) will fail to work with the new version of perl. This is because perl's ABI for binaries changed between perl 5.6 and 5.8. The solution is the delete and regenerate any such binaries you might have. I have not tried to automate this in the Debian package. -- Joey Hess <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Wed, 11 Sep 2002 21:37:56 -0400 Unlike changelog files, you don't update NEWS.Debian files with every release. Only update them if you have something particularly newsworthy that user should know about. I'm putting off getting this into policy until enough stuff uses it that we can tell it works well. But as of today it's a valid way to communicate important changes to the users of your package. -- see shy jo [1] Actually, debhelper has supported this for a long time already, but it got the file name wrong for native packages.
pgpPaUnCEZSPx.pgp
Description: PGP signature