radical suggestion for fc4 release

[Jeff Johnson]

Jeff Johnson wrote:

> seth vidal wrote:
>
>> Hi folks,
>> this is a touch silly but possibly useful and it would definitely cut
>> down on the old crap blocking up cdroms.
>>
>> how about if we kill all rpm spec file changelog entries OLDER than 2
>> years.
>>
>> they'll still live on in older srpms and rpms but it'd be a useful
>> reduction and it would make the specfiles that much smaller, along with
>> the rpm headers.
>>  
>>
>
> +1


In fact, it's silly to carry changelogs in packages, since packaging 
changes are
far more easily read from e-mail, or from a web-site, or just about any 
other
way than
    rpm -q --changelog pkg

The majority of content (note that there are definite execptions) in 
package changelogs
is rather useless.

Here's an example from a random package, util-linux:

* Mon Jan 26 2004 Elliot Lee <sopwith at redhat.com> 2.12pre-3
- Provides: mount losetup
 
* Mon Jan 26 2004 Dan Walsh <dwalsh at redhat.com> 2.12pre-2
- Add multiple to /etc/pam.d/login for SELinux
 
* Thu Jan 15 2004 Elliot Lee <sopwith at redhat.com> 2.12pre-1
- 2.12pre-1
- Merge mount/losetup packages into the main package (#112324)
- Lose separate
 
* Mon Nov 03 2003 Dan Walsh <dwalsh at redhat.com> 2.11y-35.sel
- remove selinux code from login and use pam_selinux
 
* Thu Oct 30 2003 Dan Walsh <dwalsh at redhat.com> 2.11y-34.sel
- turn on selinux
 
* Fri Oct 24 2003 Elliot Lee <sopwith at redhat.com> 2.11y-34
- Add BuildRequires: texinfo (from a bug# I don't remember)
- Fix #90588 with mountman patch142.
 
* Mon Oct 06 2003 Dan Walsh <dwalsh at redhat.com> 2.11y-33
- turn off selinux
 
* Thu Sep 25 2003 Dan Walsh <dwalsh at redhat.com> 2.11y-32.sel
- turn on selinux
- remove context selection
 
* Fri Sep 19 2003 Elliot Lee <sopwith at redhat.com> 2.11y-31
- Add patch140 (alldevs) to fix #101772. Printing the total size of
  all devices was deemed a lower priority than having all devices
  (e.g. /dev/ida/c0d9) displayed.
 
* Fri Sep 12 2003 Dan Walsh <dwalsh at redhat.com> 2.11y-31
- turn off selinux
 
* Fri Sep 12 2003 Dan Walsh <dwalsh at redhat.com> 2.11y-30.sel
- turn on selinux
 
* Fri Sep 05 2003 Elliot Lee <sopwith at redhat.com> 2.11y-28
- Fix #103004, #103954
 
* Fri Sep 05 2003 Dan Walsh <dwalsh at redhat.com> 2.11y-27
- turn off selinux
 
* Thu Sep 04 2003 Dan Walsh <dwalsh at redhat.com> 2.11y-26.sel
- build with selinux
 
* Mon Aug 11 2003 Elliot Lee <sopwith at redhat.com> 2.11y-25
- Use urandom instead for mkcramfs
 
* Tue Jul 29 2003 Dan Walsh <dwalsh at redhat.com> 2.11y-24
- add SELINUX 2.5 support
 
* Wed Jul 23 2003 Elliot Lee <sopwith at redhat.com> 2.11y-22
- #100433 patch

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.

So perhaps changelogs should be nuked entirely, and handled ouside of
package content, instead.

73 de Jeff