Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: GLEP 42 (Was: Getting Important Updates To Users)

[Grant Goodyear <g2boojum@gentoo.org>]

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Jason Stubbs wrote: [Mon Nov 07 2005, 06:37:10AM CST]
> So what's the point of the ChangeLog again? Move load from the CVS
> server and onto the rsync servers? (Don't answer that - just beating a
> dead horse ;)

*Grin*  I'm going to answer anyway, since the answer isn't necessarily
obvious to everybody.  Once upon a time, the expectation was that the
ChangeLog contained information about package modifications that would
be of interest to users, while the CVS log would contain info mainly of
interest to devs.  Of course, that was when viewcvs accessed the live
tree, too.  Since then, there seems to have been a consensus that the
CVS log should really be autogenerated from the ChangeLog, which itself
is created using ``echangelog``.  My view is that the ChangeLog should
contain user-readable descriptions (although we also encourage some
useful jargon such as "version bump") of every change a package has
undergone, providing a fairly complete history for that package that is 
much more readable than iterating through CVS diffs.  Consequently, the
ChangeLog has far too much information to realistically serve as a
low-noise news source.  (One could imagine tagging certain ChangeLog
entries as being particularly important, but that forces news to be
package based, and seems overly complicated, so please forget that I
ever brought it up.)

> I'm really just against having it in emerge, especially with the current 
> suggestion of portage just doing a little bit of maintenance work for 
> external tools and nothing else.

I'm not sure exactly what you're arguing here.  Is it just that you
think that the news stuff should be a post-sync hook instead of being
triggered explicitly by "emerge"?  

-g2boojum-
-- 
Grant Goodyear	
Gentoo Developer
g2boojum@gentoo.org
http://www.gentoo.org/~g2boojum
GPG Fingerprint: D706 9802 1663 DEF5 81B0  9573 A6DC 7152 E0F6 5B76

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