On Thu, Sep 13, 2018 at 12:00:39PM +0200, Branko Čibej wrote: > Given all the debate we've had about how to edit and merge the CHANGES > file on trunk and release branches ... how about only having the change > log in the wiki, with CHANGES containing only a pointer to the wiki page?
My impression is that shipping CHANGES in tarballs is rather important for our downstream consumers. Consumers of our source tarballs are generally system packagers who need a quick overview of what has changed. Some of them also copy parts of our changelog into files of their own, e.g. SUSE does this and is able to display changelog entries to their users during system upgrades. A plaintext file is very useful in those cases, but a separate page has numerous drawbacks: Getting a non-marked-up text representation is cumbersome, the service might not be reachable at a given momtent for various reasons, the wiki text may change over time while it is constant in a released version.