Re: [Synaptic-devel] FR: changelog

[Richard Bos]

Op woensdag 14 januari 2004 09:35, schreef Panu Matilainen:
> On Tue, 13 Jan 2004, Sviataslau Svirydau wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > There was a litle discussion in <sisyphus at altlinux.ru> mailing list
> > with suggestion to make changelog available.
> > It's not so hard to make it for installed package versions, but more
> > interesting to have it for new version or for not yet installed package
> > to decide if upgrade/installation of package really needed or not.
> > It's not good idea to include changelog in apt indexes because of size.
> > But at least for rpm there was workaround suggested: on request download
> > rpm package header and fetch changelog from there (it should be
> > perforned on apt-level, I think). And I can't say anything about debian
> > packages, somebody can?
> >
> > Any ideas?

Does that mean that the server must become a active server and actually 
process the rpm headers on the fly or will there be seperate file/database 
holding all the changelogs?  I would expect the latter, where a file with 
changelogs will be created per component.  Just like the pkglist and srclist 
files there could be a chglog file e.g.  The chglog is than retrieved by the 
apt client (synaptic)

I just tried something.  A compressed changelog file for 165 rpms is about 
350kb.  The corresponding pkglist file is about 250kb.

> This is something I've been thinking about for a long time.. and yes it
> would be nice. I agree it should happen on apt level (actually I'd like to
> expose some other things as well, like file listing of a package - IIRC
> synaptic has a debian-specific thing to do this but should be generic
> through libapt-pkg).

About the filelistings for debian there is apt-file, which expects a file/db 
in the root of the apt directory in the format:
<file>  <rpm group>

It might be good to conform to this format, so the debian tools can be used 
right away.

genbasedir supports an external data file, that can give some information, the 
option is: --updateinfo=FILE  Update information file.  Though it is not the 
same as providing the changelog information.

-- 
Richard Bos
Without a home the journey is endless