radical suggestion for fc4 release

[Jeff Johnson]

Nils Philippsen wrote:

>On Wed, 2005-02-02 at 16:24 -0500, Jeff Johnson wrote:
>  
>
>>Nils Philippsen wrote:
>>
>>    
>>
>>>On Wed, 2005-02-02 at 15:13 +0100, Florian La Roche wrote:
>>> 
>>>
>>>      
>>>
>>>>>Then the question is: why is the same changelog, i.e. the changelog of
>>>>>sub packages with the same source package, stored for each package
>>>>>individually? It could be stored once and be referenced from each sub
>>>>>package. It gets deleted once all references on it vanish.
>>>>>     
>>>>>
>>>>>          
>>>>>
>>>>People might be able to install only one of the sub-packages.
>>>>   
>>>>
>>>>        
>>>>
>>>Um, I expressed myself not clearly. Of course the package files all
>>>contain the changelog, the normalization would only happen on the RPM DB
>>>level.
>>>
>>>      
>>>
>>Which cannot happen, because immutable header regions contain changelogs,
>>and the blob is signature and/or digest verified.
>>    
>>
>
>I'm fully aware of that this would need serious work and likely
>incompatible changes to the RPM DB. You can easily reconstruct that
>single blob as it is now from a split header + changelog and verify the
>resulting blob against the signature/digest.
>  
>

You cannot reconstruct from missing information at all.

Splitting information between package header and Something Else Instead
is a rather awkward verify to develop trust in.

Adding changelogs outside of packages is what was suggested, and removing
or at least truncating, changelogs too. Either is trivially done, and 
requires zero
changes to existing rpm or rpmdb.

Or add changelogs to specspo, as that has been needed quite some time 
now, so
that developers can describe changes in their native language.

Only your blind expectation that packages contain changelogs forevermore is
is preventing you from seeing the simplicity of it all imho.

But, presumably, you are fully aware of that too. RFE in bugzilla to start
getting your changes to RPMDB to normalize changelogs on installed client
machines properly prioritized please.,

73 de Jeff