Lack of update information

[Luke Macken]

On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 08:56:58AM -0800, Jesse Keating wrote:
> On Mon, 2009-01-26 at 09:28 +0100, drago01 wrote:
> > On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 9:16 AM, Julian Sikorski <belegdol at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Rahul Sundaram pisze:
> > >> Hi,
> > >>
> > >> A while back, I tried to selectively update some packages and noticed
> > >> that the update information provided by package maintainers (seen via
> > >> PackageKit) is sorely lacking.
> > >>
> > >> * Update foo to upstream 2.16.2
> > >[..]
> > > Btw, how about pulling the data from spec %changelog automatically?
> > 
> > Well in most cases the changelog will just contain the same "update to x.y.z"
> > For some packages the changes just aren't  worth listing.
> > For example each iw release only contain minor changes, people that
> > really care about them know how to look it up.
> > I could also just add "Small fixes and minor updates from upstream"
> > but that's the same as "Update to x.y.z".
> > Copying the upstream changelog, that must people do not understand
> > does not help either.
> 
> If they're really such minor and uninteresting changes, why push them
> out to users?  Why consume infrastructure resources to build, releng
> resources to sign and push, bandwidth resources to mirror, bandwidth
> resources and cpu resources on the clients to consume the metadata, and
> cpu / disk resources on the clients to do the update?

All good questions.

> If you don't have anything interesting to say about the update, maybe
> you shouldn't be pushing the update at all.

Not only is 'Update foo to upstream 2.16.2' pointless, but that text
lives in both bodhi and koji's databases, the updateinfo.xml in our
repodata, mailing lists, CVS commit logs, and RPM changelogs...

luke