Updates lacking descriptions

[Adam Williamson]

On Thu, 2009-08-13 at 11:17 +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote:

> No, as ususal, you are demonstrating your lack of competence and 
> understanding:

And you're displaying your usual grasp of diplomacy...

> Whether a changelog entry tells
> - Update to upstream release 1.2.3
> 
> - Update due to http://ustreamurl/releasenote-1.2.3
> 
> - Upstream update:
> .. <long verbose list of details>
> 
> is entirely irrelevant to both, you and to Aunt Tilly (she won't read 
> them at all and even if she will not understand it).

No-one brought up Aunt Tilly in this context, and she's not the best
example user in this case. But I don't see how you can confidently
declare that its irrelevant to Kevin - are you reading his mind? Is he
lying when he says he reads the update descriptions, lying when he says
he understands them, or lying when he says that he finds the information
they contain to be useful?

Consider QA folks, we get an updates-testing report each day with at
least a dozen packages on it. If they don't explain why they're being
updated and what significant things have actually changed, it's very
difficult to test them reliably.

Consider Fedora's _actual_ userbase (which, as recent discussions seem
to have established, is not Aunt Tilly but reasonably clueful
enthusiasts). They would certainly be able to read update descriptions
(which are presented in the GUI when you update, BTW) and gain useful
information from them.

> Also, is naive to presume there always is a RH-BZ for each 
> upgrade/update or that a bug upstream is fixes has ever been tripped 
> over in Fedora.
> 
> With you folks demanding more explicit changelogs you are rudestly 
> pushing around package maintainers and force them to waste time to 
> fullfill your solely burecratic demands.

By this logic, asking packagers to follow _any_ kind of common policies
for the benefit of the distribution is wrong. Update descriptions are
'bureaucracy' exactly as much as documentation is bureaucracy, i.e. not
very much.

-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net