I was answering to a thread that had veered off into suggesting the PKGBUILD as a means to provide this explanation for upgrade, therefore, my references and PKGBUILD specific. I personally would prefer a mailing list option.
cactus wrote:
I would say that informing the user community as to the reason a package is updated is a needed feature. Every distribution I can think of has a changelog for packages. Most have security update channels of some form or another. Be it mailing list, rss feed, or something.
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.
True, contacting the maintainer /is/ a terrible idea. And pawing through the cvs repo is what people are doing right now. I am referring to a mailing list here, not a cvs repo. In a mailing list archive, a simple search by subject would be able to return the relevant results. It would also be better if only the package maintainers could post to the list with other people simply subscribed to it (like an announce list), so that there is no discussion going on in such a list. This lack of discussion would help in the searches (just in case someone is not a regular subscriber) by keeping the subjects in a particular standardized format.
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'.
On the other hand, it can be argued that adding such a thing is only
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.
Again, a good idea, it might even be possible to make a prog that reads this explanation from the cvs commit and automatically sends this explanation to the list (though this might remove some power from the maintainers (they might wish to send such a mail themselves, probably even with more in-depth information than what would be best for a commit)). Not to mention that this might just be one more thing to bother about. Just throwing in some ideas here. Thanks, ravster.
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