On Fri, 2022-08-19 at 10:35 +0200, Philip Hands wrote: > P.S. BTW the change Guillem suggests seems like a good idea anyway: > treating changelogs as control files.
I'm interested: why? What makes Debian's changelog different from other documentation such as the upstream changelog, release notes, man pages, ...? Most things proposed (deduplication, "dpkg --show-changelog" command, even faster extraction, etc.) can also be implemented with the existing way of installing them as regular files; the binNMU problem was also solved 10 years or so ago. There are however many downsides to special treatment of changelog: - Upstream and Debian changelog are suddenly in totally different places. Same for release notes (NEWS.Debian, NEWS). Unless one makes all of them special data ("dpkg --show-upstream-changelog", "dpkg --show-upstream-news", ...?). - It's harder to discover a Debian-specific command than regular files. And you already might want to look in /usr/share/doc for other documentation anyway. - Having to spawn an external command ("dpkg --show-changelog") just to access a file is more complicated. Ansgar