how to show upstream changes to the user

[Tim Niemueller]

Dan Horák schrieb:
> Both sides in the "Lack if update information" thread are true. The
> presented information about changes is almost useless for the user, but
> rewriting the upstream changelogs into bodhi is a superfluous burden for
> the maintainers. There is, in my opinion, a technical solution for this
> issue that can make both sides happy.
> 
> And it is new "ChangeLog" tag in RPM. It should be an URL pointing to
> upstream changelog and GUI package management tools can open a browser
> window to show the content, like they do for the home page.

Ideally changelogs could be RSS/atom feeds which can easily be parsed
and shown in packagekit. Packagekit (or Bodhi for that matter) could try
to download the feed and if it has the correct MIME type and formatting
extract the version's changelog.

The title of the feed should be something like "<package name>
<version>" so that Bodhi could extract the correct version. All this
would take is kind of a blog category/tag that produces only the version
information, since this is only using standard technologies most people
will not need to do much besides actually creating the entries. Maybe
bigger sites like sourceforge will pick up this idea and provide such
information automagically for hosted projects.

What this takes is package maintainers asking upstream to provide such a
feed. Alternatively we could write a few scripts that are able to parse
the most common ChangeLog formats and produce the feed from that.

I'm aware this is a huge task, but it would be useful, streamline the
workflow for upstream->downstream communication, and give more info to
users that really want it (I do, just thought about the Bash 4.0rc1
thread with missing changelog info, the only way to read being to
download the tarball).

Just thinking into the wild here,
	Tim

-- 
    Tim Niemueller <tim at niemueller.de>      www.niemueller.de
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