radical suggestion for fc4 release

[Panu Matilainen]

On Mon, 31 Jan 2005, Jeff Spaleta wrote:

> On Mon, 31 Jan 2005 17:43:32 -0500, Jeff Johnson <n3npq at 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 -