Lack of update information

Chris Weyl cweyl at alumni.drew.edu
Mon Jan 26 20:06:56 UTC 2009


On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 11:47 AM, Rahul Sundaram
<sundaram at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> Chris Weyl wrote:
>
>> Let's not make anything more difficult for the package maintainers,
>> eh?
>
> In general, I certainly agree but policies weren't introduced in the last to
> make life harder for maintainers but easier for end users and for a small
> additional cost to maintainers, we can benefit end users much more. We are
> doing a pretty sloppy job with updates and are providing good information on
> why those massive amount of updates are needed for end users. Just simply
> pushing the latest version isn't a good reason. There must be a definite
> need for it and bodhi should have that information from the package
> maintainers. I also suggest everyone to get more co-maintainers. Certainly
> made life much more easier for me.

It's hardly a "small additional cost", especially when looked at in
aggregate; this would be an additional non-automateable step required
for every update release that is of very questionable value/utility to
the vast majority of our users.  I realize it would make your life
easier, but is it worth an additional imposition on our already
highly-regulated maintainers just to make your life easier?  I stand
by my earlier assessment that the vast bulk of our users could care
less, and those that do care would know how to find a package's
changelog.  If this is important, we should find some way of
automatically including a pointer to upstream's changelog in the
update tool itself.

Basically, this seems to be "I don't really trust the package
maintainer's decision on why I should upgrade, so I want to know what
changes this introduces."  Which is absolutely fine -- and also when
someone should be reading upstream's changelog to understand the
changes introduced by upstream.  In terms of the spec changes as
documented in %changelog, "updated to version x.y.z" is all the
justification needed as to why the new level was built and released;
what actually changed in that new level is the purview of the upstream
maintainer.

>> Also, as others have pointed out, the rpm %changelog is the place to
>> summarize changes to the _delivered_ package, not the program itself.
>
> ... and I have pointed out repeatedly that I wasn't talking about the
> changelog but the description field in bodhi.

Not all pontifications are specifically aimed your way :-)

                                -Chris

-- 
Chris Weyl
Ex astris, scientia




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