Lack of update information

[Kevin Kofler]

Chris Weyl wrote:
> 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.

As one of those maintainers who always fill in useful update notes, I'll say
that:
* Updates should include at least one sentence of rationale why they're
being pushed, and either a summary of the changes or the URL of such a
summary from upstream. (And in some cases the rationale and the summary of
changes are the same thing - if the update fixes some critical bug, that's
an obvious reason to push it.) IMHO updates with empty update details
should get rejected by Bodhi outright, and there should also be a policy
that "update to 1.2.3" is not sufficient.
* It takes almost no time to fill that in. You have to fill in a form for
the update anyway, typing a sentence or two and copying&pasting a URL into
it isn't going to hurt your fingers.
* I'm not a fan of selective updates at all (they tend not to work
properly), but as a user I still want to know *what* I'm getting in the
update. Each time I see an update with blank update notes or just "new
upstream version", I feel an urge to kick the maintainer in the rear.

You can see my updates for examples of how I'd expect update details to look
like:
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/user/kkofler
They're not always perfect (for example, I should have tried to figure out
what changed in the latest qt-copy patches included in that qt-4.4.3-6.fc10
update - I did give the rationale for pushing it though (fixing the upgrade
path from F9)), but if you can do as good as me, that'd already be
great. ;-) And it isn't that much work.

So in case it wasn't obvious I'm in favor of a policy for useful update
details.

        Kevin Kofler