Not installing changelogs in 11.04

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

On Tue, Nov 09, 2010 at 11:18:25PM +0000, Mark Shuttleworth wrote:
> Indeed. Even having a standard way to point to the changelogs for
> packages in an archive, or specific packages, would be really useful.
> For example, if the archive said "you can find changelogs for these
> packages at <some url with subs for pkg and version> then tools could
> Just Work, including non-standard archives like get-deb and backports
> and ppa's.
> 
> And s/changelog/upstream/ too.

AOL.


On Wed, Nov 10, 2010 at 12:00:05PM +0100, Martin Pitt wrote:
> Stefano Zacchiroli [2010-11-09 11:42 +0100]:
> > So, we might want to take this chance to discuss how to properly point
> > users to where the work which is part of the packages they use come
> > from. For instance, AFAICT we lack a standard (e.g. package fields) way
> > to say where a package come from (i.e. is the "most upstream" maintainer
> > Debian or Ubuntu?)
> You mean the "most downstream" here?

Well, give or take :-) The goal I've in mind is making very clear for
the user of a package where the package comes from. That includes: 1)
the upstream software developer, 2) the distribution maintainer(s), and
3) intermediary software vendors.  Up to now, we have well defined
mechanisms to handle (1) and (2), but none (or at least none which is
standardized in some way) for (3).

It would be very interesting to have some, as it would make easy to give
proper credit.

Just to put things straight, I've a clear interest in that to enable
Ubuntu users to see the Debian origin of the packages they use, but it
totally goes both ways. We are starting to have Debian packages which
are downstream to corresponding Ubuntu packages and I believe they
should be properly credited as such. It is not that what we, as Debian,
ask to others does not apply to us :-)

> I think the machine readable copyright format would be an excellent
> place for this. It already has a "Maintainer:" field, which is a bit
> underspecified, though. I've seen packages where this has the Debian
> maintainer (which would be redundant, as it is in debian/control,
> and also often is a team), and the upstream maintainer.

I'm not sure about that. TBH it seems to me that it will be overloading
the actual purpose of that file.

I believe that package maintenance information should be maintained
elsewhere and in a more prominent place; I'm thinking at proper binary
package fields here. That would make it easier to process that
information at every place where you have package metadata, which is
pretty much everywhere.  After all, we already have proper "Homepage"
fields in package metadata ...

Having an extra field about where to find a changelog (re: Mark's
comment above) might be a bit overkilling, but it can be worked around
by some convention about where to find a changelog starting from, say,
vendor name.

> This could be extended to be something like:
> 
>   Maintainer: Joe Upstream <joe at upstream.org>
>   Debian-Maintainer: Utopia Team <pkg-utopia at ..>
> 
> On the other hand we already have the distro maintainers in
> debian/control. In Ubuntu we have moved the Debian maintainer to
> XSBC-Original-Maintainer: and set Maintainer: to "ubuntu-devel at .."
> for years already (as discussed years ago with Debian), so as long as
> debian/copyright specifies the real upstream maintainer, all
> information should be present already.
> 
> Or did you mean something different here?

I meant something like that, but I don't think Debian should be special
either, so in looking for a standard we might want to avoid having
"Debian" as part of the field name. I was rather thinking at something
like "Upstream-Vendor: Debian" (totally in look of a better name, but
you got the idea).

Now, the point is that we surely don't want to start drafting a standard
in this mail exchange :) Rather, the topic should be moved to a more
appropriate mailing list and I dare to propose
debian-derivatives at lists.d.o as a start, probably to become a DEP or
something like that later on. Is some of the readers up to kick-start
the discussion there?

Cheers.

-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
Quando anche i santi ti voltano le spalle, |  .  |. I've fans everywhere
ti resta John Fante -- V. Capossela .......| ..: |.......... -- C. Adams
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