The src:linux package has a very big changelog (about 1700 kiB uncompressed, 600 kiB gzipped). On my system the largest installed changelogs, by some way, are all versions of this. (The next largest changelogs come from src:glibc, at about 200 kiB gzipped.)
I recently had to introduce yet more installed copies of this changelog because the case where we used linked doc directories is no longer valid (arch-dependent package became arch-independent). The older history is unlikely to be of any use to users. So on smaller systems this could be a significant waste of space. (I know it's possible to filter out the installation of docs entirely, but I don't think this option is well known.) - A large part of the changelog is listing the changes in upstream stable updates. These are mostly important changes, and we already try to leave out those that are clearly irrelevant to Debian. Should we continue to include these, or limit to those that address CVEs or Debian bug reports? - Would it make sense to split the changelog, leaving older entries only in the source package? If so, should this be done manually, or would it make sense to have dh_installchangelogs split at some age or size limit? - Does it make sense to compress changelogs with xz? For src:linux, this achieves about a 20-25% reduction over gzip. Ben. -- Ben Hutchings Computers are not intelligent. They only think they are.
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