On Mon, 31 Jan 2005, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
On Mon, 31 Jan 2005 17:43:32 -0500, Jeff Johnson <n3npq@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:With no offense whatsoever to anyone, I humbly submit that the comments in the changelog are of rather limited use to any non-redhat developer, and are totally useless to any end-user.
I don't know about totally useless. I've refered to changelogs in the past to track down issues when troubleshooting issues concerned when a certain bugfix or security fix have been applied. Changelog entries that refer to specific bug numbers or CAN numbers can be quite helpful in this regard. Limited, but not totally useless value. I will conceed that I could probably use a web lookup for all this information if it were made the primary means of access to changelogs. And I would be more at ease with losing the changelogs in the package completely if package update notification texts containing the information were more closely aligned with package update mechanisms.
Package changelogs are anything but useless, I refer to them all the time. Dunno if others have noticed but I think the rpm changelogs have become much more useful and informative now that the rawhide changelog deltas are mailed to a public list :)
Sure, go ahead and nuke ancient entries from specs. The info is available in cvs and old packages for archeologists to dig if interested, a normal user is only interested in the few last changes, eg "this update broke my xxxx - what changed?".
I personally wouldn't mind if rpm -q --changelog just fetched the changelog info directly from cvs (or web, or whatever) either, just as long as the information is handily available.
- Panu -
