Changelog entries for post-release updates

[Steve Langasek]

On Fri, Feb 03, 2012 at 12:09:40PM -0800, Bryce Harrington wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 03, 2012 at 11:56:34AM -0800, Scott Ritchie wrote:
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> > Hash: SHA1

> > On 02/03/2012 11:31 AM, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> > > Now, I'm not at all picking on Micah here. This was a completely 
> > > typical Ubuntu changelog. Almost every Ubuntu changelog has
> > > roughly the same problems.

> > > How might we fix this?

> > Perhaps we shouldn't actually try to change the changelogs, and
> > instead change how they're presented to the user.  If what the user
> > actually reads could be written (and translated!) while the update is
> > still in -proposed, without requiring an entire new package upload
> > just to fix, then making human-readable changelogs could easily work
> > in the process.

> No, that'd just pawn off responsibility to some other (unmanned) team.
> Better to keep the duty with the SRU itself.  It's not *that* hard to
> write literate changelog entries.  Just always remember to answer two
> questions:  What was the problem?  How does this fix it?  And sometimes:
> Where did the fix come from?

Except that the average end user is not the primary target audience for the
changelog.  Matthew's example of "jargon" includes lots of information which
is both critical to communicate to other developers about the change, and
cannot be communicated in a jargon-free manner (considering that he's
highlighted "Debian" as an example of jargon).

Making our changelog entries conform to a standard of "human-readable" that
renders them useless to developers is not beneficial.  If we really need to
leach all the technical content out of the messages shown to users on
updates, then we ought to figure out how to separate the user-facing text
from the information needed by the developers, instead of losing the latter
in favor of the former.

-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer                                    http://www.debian.org/
slangasek at ubuntu.com                                     vorlon at debian.org
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