Updates lacking descriptions

Michael Schwendt mschwendt at gmail.com
Thu Aug 13 09:55:35 UTC 2009


On Thu, 13 Aug 2009 10:41:26 +0200, Kevin wrote:

> Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> > Correct, such a step will add a significant bureaucratic burdons to
> > maintainers.
> > 
> > As maintainers hate bureaucrazy and prefer investing time on dealing
> > with technical issues (such as bug fixes), this will likely introduce a
> > further reduction of the quality of Fedora.
> > 
> > Further more, do you realise that any changelog is likely similarly
> > unreadable to most users?
> 
> Nonsense, it's not bureaucracy to expect an update to actually say what 
> changed and why you're pushing it. I, for one, always read the descriptions.

Tiresome discussions that won't yield anything. ;)

Some package maintainers include upstream's summary of the changes in the
source code in their package %changelogs. I consider that as much too
detailed [and irrelevant to the majority of RPM package users]. Those few
who really have interest in reviewing low-level changes can take a look
at included ChangeLog files.

For some updates or upgrades I like to sum up what "type of update" it
is. Such as "Upgrade to 2.0.2 (bug-fixes)" and "Upgrade to 2.0.3 (feature
additions, rewrites and minor bug-fixes)". Also in the %changelog.
Sometimes the upstream ChangeLog, README or NEWS files sum up the changes
similarly. In other cases the only thing I can do is to examine a diff
against the previous release and try to draw my own conclusions about what
upstream's modifications are and what they are supposed to achieve.
E.g. with one upgrade test-update I've warned about a questionable
implementation that might break for some users and should be evaluated
carefully. Still, I cannot put my hands into the fire for lots of
other upstream releases.

Overall, however, what updates need is feedback from actual testers before
they are marked stable. A packager may give package %changelog a lot of
extra love, but that doesn't help if no testers give feedback in bodhi,
since most users install all updates as soon as they become available in
the "stable" updates repo. They rely on Fedora to publish good/tested
updates.




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