Package: synaptic Version: 0.83+peppermint (and others) After clicking 'Get Changelog' button in 'Description' tab of package Properties pane or pop-up, the following text appears in the 'Changelog' pop-up under the heading "Complete changelog of the latest version":
"This change is not coming from a source that supports changelogs. Failed to fetch the changelog for coreutils URI was: http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/pool/main/c/coreutils/coreutils_8.25-2ubuntu3~16.04_i386.changelog"; Whereas: $ uname -a Linux xxx 4.4.0-138-generic #164-Ubuntu SMP Wed Oct 3 15:02:00 UTC 2018 i686 i686 i686 GNU/Linux $ lsb_release -a No LSB modules are available. Distributor ID: Ubuntu Description: LXLE Eclectica 16.04 32bit (16.04.5 LTS) Release: 16.04 Codename: xenial $ apt-get --version apt 1.2.29 (i386) Supported modules: *Ver: Standard .deb *Pkg: Debian dpkg interface (Priority 30) Pkg: Debian APT solver interface (Priority -1000) S.L: 'deb' Debian binary tree S.L: 'deb-src' Debian source tree Idx: Debian Source Index Idx: Debian Package Index Idx: Debian Translation Index Idx: Debian dpkg status file Idx: Debian deb file Idx: Debian dsc file Idx: Debian control file Idx: EDSP scenario file $ apt-get changelog coreutils Get:1 http://changelogs.ubuntu.com coreutils 8.25-2ubuntu3~16.04 Changelog [56.2 kB] Fetched 56.2 kB in 0s (259 kB/s) ... Surely this ought to work in the same way in synaptic? synaptic would be able to find the changelog if its RPackage::getCandidateOriginSiteUrls() returned a vector with 0th component "changelogs.ubuntu.com", but it seems to assume that the changelog domain is always that of the package file. One might suppose that this method was introduced for generality but not fully implemented, given that for origin!="Debian" it seems to be a no-op (and also see line common/rpackage.cc#L961). Also, the apt.conf manual page description of accessing changelogs under Acquire::Changelogs::URI, which could certainly be a lot clearer, doesn't seem to be respected and and in particular the settings Acquire::Changelogs::URI::Origin::ORIGIN and/or Acquire::Changelogs::URI::Override::Origin::ORIGIN appear to be ignored. In case the package maintainers produce an update that's really a new program (Firefox ahem) or otherwise broken, the ability to view the changelog is quite critical and ought to be properly supported in synaptic. /df
