On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 12:43:28PM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
"Jared K. Smith" <jsmith(a)fedoraproject.org> writes:
> On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 11:41 AM, Michael Catanzaro
> <mike.catanzaro(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>> Perhaps the update policy should have a guideline on the minimum amount
>> of information required in this description. E.g. "update to latest
>> upstream version" might be a perfectly acceptable description for Fedora
>> given the fast pace of updates, but I don't think users should ever be
>> seeing "no update information available" and especially not "here
is
>> where you give an explanation of your update." (And I've seen this one
>> multiple times within the past couple of weeks.)
> I tend to agree here. That being said, most of my package updates are
> something along the lines of "Update to upstream 2.5 release" -- would
> you find that descriptive enough, or still lacking in detail?
FWIW, I tend to say "update to upstream release XYZ" and give a URL for
the upstream release notes for that version. This approach requires an
upstream that's well enough organized to have such a webpage for every
version, of course; but for my packages this seems to work fine. The
upstream notes tend to have way more info than I could cram into an
update description, anyway.
It'd also be great if we didn't have to duplicate changelogs
everywhere. In libguestfs, the canonical source for a change is the
git log. If I'm unlucky I may end up duplicating this three or more
times:
- in the RPM %changelog
- in the Fedora git commit (fedpkg commit -c helps here, thanks!)
- in the Bodhi update
- all of the above in the backport to the stable branch
Even if you argue that user changelogs should be different from
developer changelogs -- and I would agree -- there's still far too
much duplication needed.
In short my point is: don't moan about bad update messages when the
problem is our software sucks.
Rich.
--
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat
http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
libguestfs lets you edit virtual machines. Supports shell scripting,
bindings from many languages.
http://libguestfs.org