On 23 February 2011 20:54, Nicolas Duboc <ndu...@debian.org> wrote: > On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 12:02:30PM +0000, Reuben Thomas wrote: > [...] >> Thanks for your report, but sadly you won't save any space, you'll >> lose it. Zile does actually ship a ChangeLog file; this is what should >> appear in changelog.gz, and unsurprisingly it's bigger than NEWS. > > Reuben, > > Do you mind if I keep the NEWS file as the file installed as > changelog.gz instead of ChangeLog ? I find ChangeLog way too much > verbose and obscure for the end user. I think developers should refer > to the git repo if they need details.
>From a usability point of view, I agree, but policy says: If an upstream changelog is available, it should be accessible as /usr/share/doc/package/changelog.gz in plain text. I also think that shipping the package's NEWS as changelog is confusing. As an unscientific example, on my system there are 707 NEWS.gz files shipped in /usr/share/doc, as compared with 1502 changelog.gz's (out of 2860 packages installed). 254 ship both. You could limit the length of the changelog arbitrarily if you want (the nicest way is to use something like git log rel-X-Y-Z, where the obvious values would be to set X-Y as for the current release, and Z=0, i.e. you get the changelog for the current release series. But that's not made from the source package, so you could just abbreviate the source changelog to a decent length. Also, there is nothing about this in policy, so arguably you shouldn't. Really, this is not in the scope of this bug; can you just fix the bug for now and perhaps seek advice about the matter of principle in a better forum? -- http://rrt.sc3d.org -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
