Not installing changelogs in 11.04

[Martin Pitt]

Hello Gerfried,

Gerfried Fuchs [2010-11-09 12:09 +0100]:
>  Right, the question is wether it would make sense to remove them from
> the CD only. On the other hand, that would create different packages
> from different installation areas, thus resulting in quite some
> confusion. From what I calculated, 25 mb were thrown around, which would
> be a bit more than 3% of a regular CD size - are these numbers correct?
> Is this difference worth the confusion?

Personally I'd really like to avoid introducing this inconsistency,
and rather use the current "top ten changelog entries" approach.

>  This apt-changelog utility sounds quite helfpul. Is this going to get
> into the regular apt-utils package (within Debian) too? Actually
> aptitude changelog gnome-panel already works, but having another tool
> that better fits your workflow might be convenient.

I mainly added apt-changelog because Ubuntu doesn't install aptitude
by default. But it would be trivial to change the script to use
http://packages.debian.org/changelogs/ instead. If desired, I can do
that for Debian as well, but I think I'll let the current version bake
for a bit first. I already got tons of replies and suggestions to my
blog post, and it's easier to just change this stuff in one place for
now (in particular because it's not that urgent for Debian -- we don't
strip changelogs there).

> Also the thing here is, it creates a first case that external packagers
> might adopt - and then end with no changelogs at all because the tools
> won't know where to fetch them from? Is support or documentation for
> them available how to hook into apt-changelog, in case they'd like to
> adopt the no-changelog approach?

I'm going to introduce a configurable changelog URL (both to support
packages.d.o, as well as local mirrors), this could then be used for
this case as well. Once available, I'll add it to the apt-changelog
manpage.

> I take it the approach would take the installed package version for
> downloading as basis, and would be possible to work with branches that
> are made through releases (like for SRU, backports and the likes)?

Correct, by default it fetches the changelog for the installed
version. You can specify any other version, or "candidate" for the
latest available in your apt configuration.

>  One thing to keep in mind here is that not everyone has network access.
> Especially with CDs as installation media people are choosing that path
> to be able to install it on machines without network access. Given that
> it then requires network access to get the changelog is fighting against
> support for that environment.

Right, that's the compromise that I am willing to make. You still have
the topmost ten entries locally, anyway.

> > > 2. (mainly Gerfried and Colin) Removing the changelogs takes away an
> > > important information resource from users, though this is mitigated by
> > > providing a tool for downloading the changelogs on demand.
> > 
> > See above, with apt-changelog it should be sufficiently easy to get
> > them. Fixing apt-listchanges is also on my TODO list.
> 
>  See above, network access is not always available.

But without network access you can't download the package upgrades
either?

> And would apt-changelog offer a possibility to call it on a
> networked computer to download them all and transfer them through
> usb stick to a system to store them in their expected place?

No, I don't plan to do this. I do plan support for using a changelog
mirror, so you could point that to file:///var/cache/changelogs/ if
you mirror changelogs there.

Martin

-- 
Martin Pitt                        | http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com)  | Debian Developer  (www.debian.org)
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