[dmidecode] Usefulness of CHANGELOG

[Jean Delvare]

Hi all,

It seems to me that the CHANGELOG file as it exists today is
essentially redundant with git log. It's not really user friendly, and
duplicates the work on the committer side.

I would like to propose to delete that file, and replace it with a more
structured NEWS file, listing only the most relevant changes in each
version. The contents would be pretty much the same as the release
announcements I'm posting on this list. I have prepared an initial
version covering most past releases:

Version 3.1 (Tue May 23 2017)
  - Support for SMBIOS 3.1.0 and 3.1.1. This includes new chassis types, new
    processor family names, new processor family upgrade names, and new slot
    types, as well as support of larger BIOS ROM sizes and cache sizes, and a
    new structure type (43, TPM Device.)
  - A new command line option to query OEM strings.
  - All error messages are now printed on stderr (#47274, #48158.)
  - Several bug fixes related to 64-bit entry points (#50037 and more.)
  - Important bug fixes:
    #46176 (Unexpected end of file error)
    #46066 (Crash with SIGBUS)
  - Various minor fixes, improvements and cleanups.

Version 3.0 (Thu Sep 03 2015)
  - Support for SMBIOS 3.0. This includes new chassis types, new
    processor family names, new processor family upgrade names, new slot
    types, and new memory device types.
  - Support for the new 64-bit entry point (_SM3_) defined in SMBIOS 3.0.
  - Support for the new kernel interface (as of Linux v4.2) as an
    alternative to relying /dev/mem to access the entry point and DMI
    table.
  - Decoding of Acer-specific DMI type 170.
  - Decoding of HP-specific DMI types 212, 219 and 233.
  - Various minor fixes and output format cleanups.

Version 2.12 (Wed Apr 17 2013)
  - Support of the SMBIOS 2.8.0 specification.

Version 2.11 (Wed Jan 19 2011)
  - Support of the SMBIOS 2.7.0 specification:
    - UEFI support
    - Virtual machine flags in BIOS characteristics
    - Limited support for the Management Controller Host Interface
  - Various fixes that address stability.

Version 2.10 (Sun Nov 23 2008)
  - Support for Solaris (x86 only, of course).
  - Possibility to dump the SMBIOS/DMI table to a small binary file
    (option --dump-bin).
  - Possibility to read the SMBIOS/DMI table from such binary files
    (option --from-dump).
  - Support for SMBIOS 2.6. This includes new chassis types, new
    processor family names, new processor family upgrade names, bus
    address for system slots, and a new entry type for on-board devices,
    amongst many other minor changes.
  - Support for DMI entry type 31 (Boot integrity services).
  - Many processor family names taken from the CIM Schema document.
  - (vpddecode) No longer ask users to report broken records.
  - (vpddecode) Fix --quiet option.

Version 2.9 (Mon Feb 26 2007)
  - Support of the SMBIOS 2.5 specification. It adds many enumerated
    values for recent hardware, as well as CPU core and thread count
    reporting.
  - Decoding of 3 HP-specific entries. More vendor-specific entries can
    be supported later if vendors contribute code or documentation.
  - Run-time detection of EFI, so that a single binary can support
    Intel-based Macintosh machines and regular x86 machines.
  - Better IA-64 support.
  - Fixes to the decoding of individual fields, including the CPU
    signature of recent CPU models.
  - (biosdecode) Support of the FJKEYINF entry point type (for Fujitsu laptops).
  - (vpddecode) The product name look-up table was dropped. It was unreliable
    and a burden to maintain.
  - biosdecode, ownership and vpddecode are no longer built on IA-64.

Version 2.8 (Sat Feb 04 2006)
  - Option --string has four additional keywords available:
    system-uuid, chassis-type, processor-family and processor-frequency.
    These needed additional work because, technically speaking, they are
    not DMI strings.
  - IPMI interface type SSIF was added. This is a new interface type
    defined by IPMI 2.0.
  - (vpddecode) New --string option, much similar in spirit to
    dmidecode's. Available keywords are bios-build-id, box-serial-number,
    motherboard-serial-number, machine-type-model and bios-release-date.
  - (vpddecode) 9 product names were added to the lookup table.
  -  A few bug fixes, cleanups and minor improvements all around the place.

Version 2.7 (Thu Aug 04 2005)
  - New command line interface. For example, it is now possible to limit
    the output of dmidecode to a given DMI type, or to extract a single
    string from the DMI table. The documentation has been updated
    accordingly.
  - The default output of dmidecode was slightly modified to be more
    easily readable by humans. This might break tools parsing its output.
    Such tools may benefit from the new command line interface, although
    this interface shouldn't be considered stable until version 2.8.
  - (vpddecode) New command line interface.
  - (vpddecode) 6 product names were added.

Version 2.6 (Mon Feb 28 2005)
  - Fixes a 2 GB memory limit regression.
  - Basic command-line handling.
  - BeOS and Cygwin support.

Version 2.5 (Thu Nov 11 2004)
  - Code cleanups.
  - Compatibility fixes.
  - Documentation updates.

Version 2.4 (Fri Mar 19 2004)
  - Manual pages added.
  - (vpddecode) Many improvements.
  - A few fixes and minor improvements.

Version 2.3 (Sun Oct 19 2003)
  - Support of x86_64 systems.
  - Support of systems with 2 GB and more memory.
  - Loads of bug fixes and corrections.
  - New tool "vpddecode" added.

Version 2.2 (Fri Aug 08 2003)
  - Support of IA-64 systems.
  - Support of IBM and Fujitsu-Siemens laptops.
  - Many minor bug fixes.
  - New tool "ownership" added.

Version 2.1 (Tue Jun 10 2003)
  - Support of the SMBIOS 2.3.4 specification.
  - Better support of IPMI.
  - Minor bugs fixed.
  - Documentation added.

The size of this new file is about 10% of the size of the CHANGELOG
file.

Opinions?

Thanks,
-- 
Jean Delvare
SUSE L3 Support