changelogs in packages and space use

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Fri, 2007-08-31 at 02:14 -0400, seth vidal wrote:
> On Fri, 2007-08-31 at 08:01 +0200, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> > On Thu, 2007-08-30 at 22:47 -0400, seth vidal wrote::
> > > 
> > > 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?
> > 
> > 3 is a data loss of possibly useful info, and 1 doesn't help rpm
> > download size. I think clearly proposal nr 2 is the best.
> 
> okay - then if 2 is implemented in rpm then I'd suggest we limit it to
> the last year, that's two releases-worth of changelogs -it should cover
> reasonably well.
Hmm, I am not convinced that this is a good move, because such a
"time-based pruning" is a pretty random/arbitrary criterion, which is
not necessarily related to a changelog entry's value. 

The same applies to "n-th last entries" or "size-based pruning".

Instead I'd prefer "source-level downsizing", i.e. maintainers to keep
their changelog's in "reasonable shape".

Ralf