Viewing changelog entries on package updates (was Re: changelogs in packages and space use)

[Stewart Adam]

On Sat, 2007-09-01 at 22:55 +0200, Michael Schwendt wrote:
>[snip]
> And many packages really contain dozens
> of non-interesting entries, such as
> 
>  - update to 1.2.3
>  - rebuilt
>  - update to 1.2.2
>  - rebuilt
>  - rebuilt
>  - update to 1.2.1
>  - rebuilt
>  - sync with devel
>  - minor spec changes
>  - update to 1.2.0
>  ...
>  - mass-rebuild
>  - rebuilt
>  - patch merged upstream    <-- in a comment from 1999 - uh?
>  - update to 0.3.0
>[snip]

Reading this reminded me of something - It's really annoying to have to
download in many cases 100-200MB of packages to find that the changelog
contained 'rebuild' or some other minor change that might not affect you
at all. Many people have a cap on bandwidth so it's a shame to waste
that 200MB, not to mention that time for those on dial-up.

A configurable option in Pirut that would display the changelog entries
of a package from the currently installed version to the updated version
in the 'Update Details' window would be very useful. I'm just not sure
how hard it would be to integrate into Pirut / if the metadata contains
that information so I'll say sorry in advance if this is completely
unfeasible/unreasonable.

A workaround would be deltaRPMs in which case that 200MB becomes
something more like 10MB, but even then the changelog view is still
nice ;)

Regards,
Stewart