Updates lacking descriptions

[Michael Schwendt]

On Thu, 13 Aug 2009 15:51:57 +0200, Kevin wrote:

> AIUI, the package changelog only really needs to contain what you changed in 
> the specfile,

Tell that all the package maintainers, who do it differently.

> > Overall, however, what updates need is feedback from actual testers before
> > they are marked stable.
> 
> That's really a separate issue from the lack of details.

For me it isn't.  I won't spend extra time on writing special summaries
for a test-update, if nobody contributes any testing. Once the update has
been marked stable, it's too late. It will be installed by some users
"blindly". They won't base any decision on reading the update
description. Not even the list of affected bugzilla tickets in bodhi
implies that the fixes are correct or won't cause side-effects. A
minor feature addition might cause the software to crash in untested
environments. The update description doesn't add any quality. It just
adds some eye-candy and creates another place where the packager can
fail (and miss details or include wrong information, for example).
Packaging quality depends on other factors, such as the amount
of time a package maintainer spends on cherry-picking upstream releases
or snapshots, self-contributed bug-fixes and testing prior to release.

Same applies to online changelog URLs. Tracking down locations on upstream
websites (and verifying them with every update) is nothing else than an
unnecessary burden. Just as upstream authors don't maintain their
tarball ChangeLogs always, there is no guarantee that an online
changelog would be up-to-date.