Package: apt-listchanges Version: 3.22 Severity: wishlist Dear Maintainer,
>From my perspective, this is technically not a new bug report; it is another part of the wishlist item reported as bug #841837, which was not addressed by the change which led that bug report to be closed. The change made under that bug report resulted in identical binNMU entries being folded together, and listed with one entry per identical changelog, at the end of the list. This is a major improvement, and addresses the large majority of cases where such identical entries made change lists hard to read. However, as mentioned in that wishlist bug report, binNMUs are not the only context in which substantially-identical changelogs occur: > (At the moment, I am also seeing a mass set of identical entries in > an apparently maintainer-initiated update to set of KDE-related > packages; a couple of dozen or so packages seem to have been updated > simultaneously to the same version, with identical or near-identical > changes in each. This sort of issue thus is not exclusive to such > automatic rebuilds, it's just most common there.) I am once again seeing this, albeit at a smaller scale, with a mass update to KDE-related packages. Specifically (although I cannot guarantee that this is the full set of affected packages, without spending more time on analyzing each changelog entry than I want to invest), kcrash, kdbusaddons, and kemoticons have changelog entries for version 5.70.0-1 which differ only in the package name and the exact timestamp. (Some other packages involved in the same mass update seem to include a changelog section for that version which is identical to the one from the packages named, but also have an additional changelog section for the same version to describe other changes which are specific to each package. Otherwise, there would probably be closer to a dozen packages which I could easily list. Splitting out such identical sections from otherwise-differing changelog entries would clearly do more harm than good.) Part of the request made under that bug report was for all such identical changelog entries to be folded together, much (if not necessarily exactly) as is now done with binNMUs; whether the identical changelog entries result from binNMUs or from something else is not relevant to that purpose. Please either extend the current binNMU folding to catch other types of identical changelog entries and treat them similarly, or add an additional feature (possibly requiring enablement via an option) to cause such additional identical entries to be folded together in a similar way. (I can easily see that this may be a less commonly desired behavior, and that indeed some people may prefer to have it not happen, given that it would break up the orderly listing of package versions in cases where other versions' changelog entries to the same packages are not similarly identical. As such, making this an optional behavior which has to be enabled would probably be more appropriate than making it the default.) -- System Information: Debian Release: bullseye/sid APT prefers testing APT policy: (900, 'testing'), (800, 'stable'), (500, 'testing-debug') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Foreign Architectures: i386 Kernel: Linux 5.6.0-1-amd64 (SMP w/12 CPU cores) Kernel taint flags: TAINT_WARN Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash Init: sysvinit (via /sbin/init) LSM: AppArmor: enabled Versions of packages apt-listchanges depends on: ii apt 2.1.5 ii debconf [debconf-2.0] 1.5.74 ii python3 3.8.2-3 ii python3-apt 2.1.3 ii python3-debconf 1.5.74 ii sensible-utils 0.0.12+nmu1 ii ucf 3.0042 apt-listchanges recommends no packages. Versions of packages apt-listchanges suggests: ii chromium [www-browser] 81.0.4044.92-1 ii dillo [www-browser] 3.0.5-7 ii elinks [www-browser] 0.13.1-4 ii exim4-daemon-light [mail-transport-agent] 4.93-16 ii iceweasel [www-browser] 38.8.0esr-1~deb8u1 ii kterm [x-terminal-emulator] 6.2.0-46.2 ii links [www-browser] 2.20.2-1+b1 ii lynx [www-browser] 2.9.0dev.5-1 ii python3-gi 3.36.0-3 ii w3m [www-browser] 0.5.3-38 ii xterm [x-terminal-emulator] 356-1 -- debconf information: * apt-listchanges/save-seen: true * apt-listchanges/which: both * apt-listchanges/email-format: text * apt-listchanges/email-address: root * apt-listchanges/reverse: false * apt-listchanges/no-network: false * apt-listchanges/frontend: pager * apt-listchanges/headers: false * apt-listchanges/confirm: true
