Although it's an admirable goal to have the timestamps of the
documents represent their most recent change, I'm not sure it's
feasible without a gross ammount of effort. The thirteen files with
the time stamp of 2006-04-13 13:48 are all upstream documentation. The
time stamps are munged by any number of processes, including
generating the HTML file from the DocBook XML file.
The Debian specific documentation is another matter. I should be able
to keep the time stamps of README.Debian, changelog.Debian and
copyright correct. I'll keep this in mind the next time I do a
maintenance release of FreeGuide.
Cheers,
Shaun
On 4/14/06, A. Costa <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Package: freeguide
> Version: 0.10.3-1
> Severity: minor
>
>
> The dates of the files in '/usr/share/doc' help readers
> find what's new and different. But:
>
> # how many files in '/usr/share/doc/freeguide'?
> % ls /usr/share/doc/freeguide | wc -l
> 16
>
> # count repeats of the 16 file dates in '/usr/share/doc/freeguide'
> # first column is the count.
> % ls -l /usr/share/doc/freeguide | cut -b 30-41 | sed '/^$/d' | sort |
> uniq -c
> 1 Apr 13 11:40
> 1 Apr 13 11:58
> 1 Apr 13 15:24
> 13 Apr 13 15:48 # 13 of this one.
>
> Something's needlessly advancing the dates, even though some files,
> ('README.Debain' for example), apparently haven't changed since 2004.
>
> User experience: I'd read the new changelog, it said there was a new upstream
> version, so I was trying to learn what's new by looking at the dates
> in '/usr/share/doc/freeguide'; that doesn't work when the dates are
> the same.
>
> It would be better if each file was dated by its most recent change of
> content.
>
> Hope this helps...
