On Mon, Mar 04, 2002 at 10:38:15PM -0500, Joey Hess wrote: > The method of finding a package's changelog that I had always assumed > would be used is: > > if (the package is native via dpkg) > return /usr/share/doc/package/changelog.gz > else > return /usr/share/doc/package/changelog.Debian.gz
Unfortunately, this doesn't work. Check out /usr/share/doc/dpkg/changelog{,.Debian}.gz. > I have no idea what methods the current set of tools that search out > debian changelogs use, and I would be leery of breaking them by changing > policy, if they do happen to use the technique I'd assumed they'd use. > > It looks like apt-listchanges for one does look for both changelogs, at > the expense of running dpkg-deb --fsys-tarfile twice for native > packages. Note that in this case if it could be assured of my method > working, it could be sped up since it already knows the version number > of the package. I went over and over this in the early days of apt-listchanges, because there were so many corner cases that had to be covered (consider a package which includes the upstream changelog as changelog.gz, but depends on another package to provide changelog.Debian.gz). I hate the way it has to be done now, and I would gladly embrace a new policy which would put the changelog in one place all the time, or at least one that can be determined without reading through the tarball. Personally, I think it would be a good idea to require every binary package to include a copy of the changelog with a static filename. Otherwise, you can't necessarily get the up-to-date changelog from it, even if it is installable (doesn't have a versioned dependency on the package providing the real changelog). -- - mdz