On Fri, Feb 7, 2014 at 9:39 AM, Jerome Leclanche <adys...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi list > > The subject came up at FOSDEM on a packaging discussion. I thought > it'd be worth bringing up here. > Pacman has extremely basic and non-advertised support for changelogs. > These are maintainer changelogs, not upstream changelogs, and seem to > be completely useless. In fact, in my 900~ package install, only iotop > and zsh-syntax-highlighting have a changelog at all and they all list > "Updated to release ...".
Many packages that ship them, don't have an up to date changelog e.g. https://projects.archlinux.org/svntogit/community.git/plain/trunk/ChangeLog?h=packages/volwheel The consensus is (or at least was half a year ago) that such changelogs should be removed https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/37105 > > My personal recommendation, and what makes the most sense, is to allow > for (and highly recommend) upstream changelogs. If there is a > changelog file, that can be displayed in pacman -Qc (regardless of its > format). > There is also the subject of online-only changelogs. Should they be > downloaded, or should -Qc display "Read the changelog at http://..."? > My first thought is that's up to the packager/maintainer, they would > know better on a per-package basis. There's https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/33960 > > Debian is really good with its packaging changelogs. Afaik they're the > only distro that properly uses them. They're a lot less relevant to > arch linux due to the very nature of the distro ("trust upstream") but > I don't think they're useless; in fact, we should probably distinguish > packaging and upstream changelogs. > Final question is, what of the syntax? I have a few things in mind but > I'd like to hear whether such changes would be welcome at all first. > > Cheers > > J. Leclanche >