I made no distinction that this should be included as a feature of pacman. It just needs to be done in some way. I don't see why people are automatically trying to bolt this onto pacman...
Ravi Desai wrote:
And for those users who wish to know the cvs changes, set up a
(automated?) cvs mailing list or something. The majority of the users
really don't need this, and again, it's not the job of the package
manager.
I would say that it IS the job of a package maintainer to know why they are updating a package, and to provide a means to letting people know why they did it. Be it a somewhate meaningful cvs changelog, or an email to a mailing list. Just...anything..
If someone /really/ needs to know the reasons, they should either mail the packager or (preferably) check out the cvs commit mailing list archives.
So, having the package maintainer provide a one time, quick and easy, information outflow path, is somehow worse than 100s of users each requesting information individually? Or are you saying that people should not have easy access to reasoning why packages are updated? I think making users paw through the cvs repository changelogs themselves is baroque to say the least. And having everyone contact the maintainers directly is even worse.
On the other hand, it can be argued that adding such a thing is only some text, and could be put in an array (like depends) and it could be made possible to view this explanation for upgrade through 'pacman -Qi'.
Again, keep it out of pacman. Just provide SOME mechanism for easy access to a changelog information. The main website provides a list of recently changed packages. The addition of information as to why the package changed should be a logical progression.
I am honestly dumbfounded that this is an arguable topic. In the scheme of things, adding a little text to a cvs commit, or some similarly minute mechanism, doesn't seem terribly difficult.
--
--------------------------
Bender: It was horrible! A nightmare!
Fry: What happened?
Bender: I dreamt I was in a place of 0's and 1's and all of a sudden... I saw a two *whimper*
Fry: It's ok Bender, don't worry. There's no such thing as 2's.
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