Re: [gentoo-dev] Revisiting GLEP 19

[Andrew Cowie <andrew@operationaldynamics.com>]

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On Wed, 2004-07-21 at 16:08 +0100, Stuart Herbert wrote:
> Think of it this way.  Good change information, like good QA, is something 
> that is part of the professional behaviour reasonably expected of a software 
> engineer.

Someone else alluded to this, and I'd just like to reinforce the point:
in terms of assessing the risk of a potential upgrade, some sense of
what has changed is necessary.

Unfortunately, the typical ChangeLog in portage is:

  18 Feb 2004; David Holm <dholm@gentoo.org> db-4.2.52_p1.ebuild:
  Added to ~ppc.

and

  *evolution-1.4.6 (22 Mar 2004)

  22 Mar 2004; Alastair Tse <liquidx@gentoo.org> evolution-1.4.6.ebuild:
  version bump

the trouble is especially evident in the second example. What are the
changes between evo 1.4.5 and evo 1.4.6?

That, of course, is answered by the contents of the upstream ChangeLog,
which there usually is one. In this case it is:

  http://developer.ximian.com/projects/evolution/release_notes/1.4.6.html

Which is actually what I, in an enterprise deployment manager role, need
to know about before I can make an upgrade decision. The stuff about
arches being marked stable, etc, is, while internally important, not
terribly interesting compared to this.

It would be fantastic if we can find a way to include such information.
After all, the developer doing the version bump (or better yet, the user
making the bug report) probably at least had a look at the changes list,
where ever it is to be found. That information should at least be
hyperlinked, and, far better - (especially if we're switching to an XML
format) included in Gentoo's ChangeLogs.

Cheers,

AfC

-- 
Andrew Frederick Cowie

OPERATIONAL DYNAMICS
Operations Consultants and Infrastructure Engineers

http://www.operationaldynamics.com/

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