Re: What would it take to drop release and changelog from our spec files? (and do we want to?)

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On Friday, January 10, 2020 5:36:46 PM CET Pierre-Yves Chibon wrote:
> Do we want to drop release and changelog from our spec file?

No.  People continuously tend to forget that '%changelog' is for
end-users.  Especially if some distributions already claim they can live
fine without %changelog...

Unless product managers say that 'rpm -q --changelog' is not a thing
nowadays, we should at least _allow_ being "nice" to end users.  So
whatever approach we use by default -- the maintainers still have to have
a chance to maintain %changelog manually.

That said, to not loose the freedom, yes - we can implement some
automation - but only if that can be turned off.  By those who care about
%changelog.

Regarding automation, I'm sceptic.  See how GNU maintains ChangeLog files
... and how difficult is to edit the ChangeLog entries retrospectively
when some automation breaks it.  If people claim maintaining %changelog is
too expensive so they want it generated -- having it generated is even
more expensive.  I mean if maintainer cares to have '-q --changelog' nice.

> With the changelog it becomes a little bit more tricky.
> We currently have 3 changelogs in Fedora with 3 different target audience (this
> is how I understand them):
>   - One for the files in the git repository, meant to be "consumed" by our
>     fellow packagers, not meant to leave the Fedora infrastructure
>   - One in the spec file describing the changes applied to it. This one is meant
>     to be accessible to sysadmins who want to know/check what changed in a package
>   - One in bodhi, meant for end-user consumption and which should give some
>     explanation as to why the package was updated or where information about the
>     update can be found

In ideal world, shouldn't the bodhi change description be equivalent to
%changelog, or at least a super-set of %changelog?  If these were equivalent,
maintainers woudl have to think more about %changelog.

> So we need to, somehow, merge two changelogs into one while realizing that some
> information in one may not be desirable in the other (for example the world
> famous commit message: "oops I've forgot to upload the sources" does not need to
> appear in the RPM's changelog).
> Would it be easier to merge the git changelog with the spec changelog or the
> spec changelog with the bodhi notes?

spec changelog with bodhi notes

> For the former one easy way to achieve this is to consider all the commits since
> the last successful build and have a magic keyword to either include or exclude
> a commit message in the changelog.
> For the latter, we discussed the idea of using annotated git tags this fall.
>
> Both have their pros and cons, do people have some experience with either and
> could share their feedback?

See the GNU (e.g. gnulib) `make ChangeLog`.  The annotated tags are IMO
used in rpkg-util, and for regular git user they are "magic".  People will start
asking where the changelog is defined, how to change it, etc.

Pavel


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