Re: [Quilt-dev] Changes file

[Jean Delvare]

Hi Togan,

Le Monday 17 February 2014 à 20:12 +0100, address@hidden a écrit :
> >>>>> "Jean" == Jean Delvare <address@hidden> writes:
> 
>     Jean> Hi all,
>     Jean> Can we get rid of quilt.changes? It's a pain to maintain, I keep
>     Jean> forgetting adding entries to this file and I'm sure I'm not alone. 
> And I
>     Jean> think it's essentially redundant with git log.
> 
> Well someone would have to create the quilt.changes file at least for opensuse
> packages because it is required by the opensuse packaging guidelines
> 
> http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Creating_a_changes_file_%28RPM%29
> 
> So what you are planning to  gain with dropping is not clear at least to me

The very same information the packager is getting from quilt.changes,
he/she can get from git log instead. And at least nothing is missing
from git log, while entries are missing from quilt.changes every now and
then (sometimes on purpose but often not.)

So the my first proposal is to drop quilt.changes, and the gain is that
we developers no longer have to maintain that file. A side gain is a
reduction of the package size, as the quilt.changes file now exceeds 150
kB and keeps growing, it is already almost as large as the source code
itself (180 kB.)

I know very well what is needed for openSUSE packages, as I am the one
packaging quilt there. You can't just copy our quilt.changes in the
package, you are supposed to write a short digest of the user-visible
changes. It is written in the wiki page you pointed: "keep it as short
as possible." Our quilt.changes is everything but short.

For example, when I updated the openSUSE quilt package to v0.61, I wrote
the following change summary:

- update to 0.61
  o No new feature, but almost two years of fixes and minor
    improvements.
  o Many fixes and improvements to quilt.el (emacs integration.)
  o Many fixes and improvements to the setup command, which we
    already had as patches.
  o Parameter quoting fixes to many commands.
  o Several fixes and improvements to remove-trailing-ws, together
    with a dedicated test case.
  o Various fixes to the pop, push, refresh and patches commands.
  o Translation fixes and updates.

These correspond to 22 entries and 45 individual items in quilt.changes.

So in the end each packager must do some work to summarize the changes,
and this effort is duplicated across distributions.

So my second proposal is that we developers write the change summary.
This will make packager's lives easier. As I wrote before, I have no
strong opinion on where and when the summary should be written. The
easiest is probably to write it at release time and include it in the
announcement. Including it in the source tree is fine with me too, as it
will be much smaller than today's quilt.changes.

I volunteer to retroactively write the digests for v0.60 and v0.61, if
that helps getting things started.

-- 
Jean Delvare
Suse L3 Support