Ticket #28 (closed: wontfix)

Opened 5 years ago

Last modified 5 years ago

release tarballs don't have NEWS or Changelog

Reported by: gdt Assigned to:
Keywords: Cc:

Description (Last modified by bjourne)

pkgsrc asks maintainers to include a summary of important changes when upgrading. I upgraded pkgsrc from 1.3.0. to 1.6.1, and was not able to find a summary of what had changed. It would be nice to include a NEWS file following the GNU conventions.

Change History

09/01/08 05:23:37 changed by bjourne

  • status changed from new to closed.
  • resolution set to wontfix.
  • description changed.

Sorry to make your life hard. There isn't a NEWS file because there is a Release History page. A NEWS file would just duplicate that. For ChangeLog, there is svn log -v. The gnuify-changelog.pl script can be used to make that output "ChangeLog-ish."

09/01/08 13:50:09 changed by gdt

Sorry, I should not have dragged changelog into this - I know I could have read the svn commit messages, but typically they are voluminous and it's the concise summary of user-visible changes that's normally in NEWS that I was after.

I didn't find the release history when I went looking, so I'd say it's too hard to find. It would be good to link to it from near the list of tarballs, and to include a NEWS file that points to it, saying just "In lieu of a GNU-style NEWS file, see the Release History page at <URL>."

I should point out a few assumptions that I didn't make explicit: I think release tarballs should more or less stand on their own, and that it's good to follow long-standing conventions because other people's brains are already used to them. Thanks for listening.

09/01/08 14:02:54 changed by gdt

Your Release History page contains exactly the kind of information I was looking for; I would just cut/paste that into the commit message for the pkgsrc Makefile change. I'll put a link in the pkgsrc makefile so that even without NEWS the next person will be able to find it.