On Mon, 31 Jan 2005, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
On Mon, 31 Jan 2005 17:43:32 -0500, Jeff Johnson
<n3npq(a)nc.rr.com> 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 -