Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Changelogs

[Simon Stelling <blubb@gentoo.org>]

Hi,

Duncan wrote:
> and see what's up, or one can visit the website and check it out there,
> but for such a critical part of a Gentoo machine's infrastructure, one
> would certainly wish for something a bit easier than either of these. 

Erm, is that a joke? You want an easier way than browsing to a web page
and read? Why should portage go different ways than every other software
project?

> Expanding on the idea a bit further, what about creating a generic "emerge
> changelog" function, that fetches the tarball if necessary, then extracts
> only the changelog, and opens it for viewing (presumably using the $PAGER
> environmental variable to determine what to display it with)?  Naturally,
> given Gentoo can't control the upstream changelog format, enforcing
> parseability rules as it does for its own, the entire changelog would of
> necessity be displayed, leaving the user to figure out the relevant
> cutoffs instead of doing it automatically as emerge -pl does with the
> portage tree changelogs, but it'd still be a rather easier way to view
> upstream changelogs before installation (or for that matter, after) than
> we have now.

Portage is a package manager. package managers have to manage package
versions and their dependencies. They do NOT have to be fancy changelog
readers. As you already stated, it's not the developers responsibility
to get you upgrade information. While I can see a great benefit in
putting important information into the changelog, I really can't see why
portage should provide functions to read a changelog, when nearly all
packages provide the same information on their homepages. Additionally,
if you really have to read the changelog before emerging the new
version, the information is really important, and I'm sure it will show
up in portage's changelog.

Please don't make portage a news reader.

Regards,

-- 
Simon Stelling
Gentoo/AMD64 Operational Co-Lead
blubb@gentoo.org
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