Re: [Linuxcoe-devel] Update on packaging

[Bruno C. <Bru...@hp...>]

Bryan Gartner said on Fri, Oct 26, 2007 at 06:44:48AM -0600:

> Hmm, you have pointed out one complete oversight on my part (that
> is not maintaining the ChangeLog ... for a very long time).  Whoops!

As a socker player, I can say 1-0 ;-)

> > What I mean is that for mondo e.g. I have:
> > 
> > # $Id: ChangeLog 1679 2007-10-11 23:24:45Z bruno $
> 
> I can certainly add the # $Id: $, yet for CVS, this really only reflects the
> revision of that particular file.

Well that was really a detail. Useful, but not mandatory.

> Actually, AFAICT, the format is completely standard:
> 
> 	http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/changelogs/guile-changelogs_3.html

Humm, wasn't aware of thet one. But after reading I find it dated if I
may express my opinion.

When used in conjunction of a good CMS (CVS being average for me, SVN
good, and maybe git, arch, ... excellent as I never tried them) I think
some of those rules are useless (especially documenting the file names
changed, which is the role of the SCM). 

In particular, I think the link between the version and the list of
modification is the most capital information. And it's completely
missing here, and could be unrelated to dates events.

And also currently it's rather considered poorly to add e-mail addresses
in those files, as it would be a help for spammers :-( (I changed mine
in particular for that).

I took example from the result of locate ChangeLog on my HDD (for
non-gnu projects as those tend to respect the format of the project ;-):

Kino:
=====
[...]
Changes in version 1.1.1:
        Changes by Dan Dennedy:
        - commands.cc: bugfix segfault on crash recovery with gtk+
          version < 2.11

Changes in version 1.1.0:
        Changes by Dan Dennedy:

less:
=====
[...]
Version 1.53 Apr 11, 2006
- support for Openoffice documents (Florian Cramer, Vincent Lefevre)
- support for RAR archives (suggested by Cindy Leonhardt)
[...]
Version 1.44 Dec 14, 2004
-------------------------
- fixes in configure script (Slaven Rezic)

netcat:
=======
[*] Sun Jan 11 2004 - netcat v0.7.1

  o Fixed bug in UDP connection code, using pktinfo support. [BUG
#796765]
  o Fixed a segfault in the DNS lookup routines, caused by invalid DNS
    configurations.
[...]
[*] Thu Aug 21 2003 - netcat v0.7.0

  o Added command line switch `-c' (close), which shuts down the
connection
    on EOF from stdin without waiting for any answer from remote host.

Honestly taken randomly.

So I'd tend to conclude that only official GNU projects follow the rule,
other use varied format.
Again, my problem is that I need to extract info from the changelog to
generate the %changelog entries for spec file (and I do the same for deb
changelog as well). But I really need the version info for the spec. So
it needs to be somewhere (could be in another place. Again I don't want
to duplicate info, just keeping it complete and coherent in one single
place, and generate the rest from that single instance.

Time for a ChangeLog RFC ;-)

> So, not really sure where to go on this one (other than poke myself to
> update this as changes are made).  That said, the debian/changelog file
> which should be maintained (and was created) by the dch command does
> have a slightly different format.  Color me confused on how to proceed.

What I can propose is a tool in pb which would:

Take a pb ChangeLog file (under pbconf/pkg) and process it to create a
ChangeLog file in the tar file, the %changelog section in the spec and
the changelog file for deb. THat's pretty easy. Keep the objective of a
single source and respect the target of good changelogs everywhere where
it's needed.

Your ideas ?

Bruno.
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