retitle 646622 apt-listchanges: please parse upstream changelog, too (perhaps
with packages' help)
reassign 646622 apt-listchanges 2.85.8
quit
Hi,
Nemo Inis wrote:
> I have a suggestion from an end-user point of view:
>
> All too often when checking incoming updates (in Synaptic or other tools) the
> Debian changelog includes a mere mention "new upstream release".
[...]
> But for the convenience of the end-user, it would be nice
> if a summary of the upstream's changelog would be included too (like new
> features, UI changes, backward compatibility problems, etc..) This would avoid
> having to go hunt for it on every single package, and would make the whole
> process more user-friendly.
The package you are looking for is debian-policy. But I am going to
assign this report to apt-listchanges instead --- if apt-listchanges
could parse upstream changelogs (with maintainer help), then there
would be no need for a summary in the Debian changelog except when a
particularly notable upstream change has appeared.
I can imagine two different ways to do that:
A. Encourage packagers to provide a metadata file with the following
information:
format: the upstream changelog format. The value is the name
of a changelog parsing helper fulfilling the
dpkg-parsechangelog interface, like the argument to
"dpkg-parsechangelog -F"
dversionmangle: a rule to map from the upstream component of
the Debian version to an upstream version number, just like in
uscan's "debian/watch" file.
Or:
B. Maintain state out-of-band to indicate how much of the upstream
changelog has been read. E.g., keep the top few lines read and
total number of lines, and for each new version we look for lines
similar to those lines the indicated number of lines from the end
of the file to decide where the new changelog entries stop.
Sane?
Thanks and hope that helps,
Jonathan
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