changelogs in packages and space use

[seth vidal]

On Fri, 2007-08-31 at 11:58 +0900, Mamoru Tasaka wrote:
> seth vidal wrote, at 08/31/2007 11:47 AM +9:00:
> > Colin Walters mentioned on irc reducing the changelogs kept in pkgs a
> > bit to help us fit on the livecd a bit better. I didn't really believe
> > it would make enough of an impact to be noticeable but I did a little
> > mucking about and found I was wrong. So I wrote this:
> > 
> > http://skvidal.fedorapeople.org/changelog/changelog-sizes.py
> > 
> > That may not seem like much but when we're squinched for space in 700M
> > on a livecd that 8.6M might be all that's needed. Moreover it may be a
> > bit silly to be carting all of this history around in all the pkgs and
> > repodata and in the rpmdb. Esp if we're trying to trim download sizes
> > for various items. So things we can do:
> > 
> > 1. trim the changelogs at createrepo-runtime - fine - but that only gets
> > it for the repodata
> > 
> > 2. trim repos at rpmbuild time - great - I've suggested it as an option
> > to rpmbuild on rpm-maint list. 
> > 
> > 3. trim them out of the pkgs the next time we change a package. Just
> > prune them down to the last years worth of changelogs - maybe saving the
> > old changelogs in a file in the cvs repository - or even into an unused
> > source file in the srpm?
> > 
> > What're people's thoughts on this?
> 
> Just note that this is once discussed on:
> http://www.redhat.com/archives/rhl-devel-list/2007-May/msg01646.html
> (I guess no conclusion was made though).

You're right - no conclusion - but I guess I should put this to the
packaging committee to get it added to the criteria - if we nuke
everything but the last years worth from the %changelog and we do that
as something useful to do for every release - then we'll be able to keep
it pruned down and we'll still keep the history.

People on the packaging committe - does that sound fair?

-sv