Bug#383708: NEWS.Debian per source or binary package? (was: Bug#383708: exim4-config: SPF-related documentation issues)

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Sun, Aug 20, 2006 at 09:52:18PM +0200, Andreas Barth wrote:
> * Matt Zimmerman (mdz at debian.org) [060820 12:12]:
> > On Sat, Aug 19, 2006 at 11:26:30PM +0200, Marc Haber wrote:
> > > On Sat, Aug 19, 2006 at 09:38:45PM +0200, Robert Millan wrote:
> > > > I'm afraid I don't know apt-listchanges.
> > > 
> > > Buggy as a june meadow and suboptimally maintained. Things can change
> > > soon, as apt-listchanges has just gotten a new maintainer.
> > 
> > Lack of support for this setup isn't a bug; NEWS.Debian has always been
> > loosely defined as being just like the Debian changelog but with a different
> > category of information.  The Debian changelog has always corresponded to
> > source packages, not binary packages, and so apt-listchanges has always
> > treated it that way, and treats NEWS.Debian the same.
> 
> Hm. Though I remember about NEWS.Debian being formated like changelog, I
> cannot remember that NEWS.Debian is per source package.

It was not discussed, and apt-listchanges (are there any other tools which
use this file?) has always used that interpretation.

If I'm not mistaken, dh_installchangelogs defaults to copying the same
NEWS.Debian file into each binary package, just as it does with changelog,
so this was a reasonable assumption from my perspective.

> There can be multiple cases when some information for one binary package
> is important, but for another is useless. People reading NEWS.Debian
> (and people read that usually from installed binary packages) should
> only get information useful for them. Changelog is however read often in
> changes-files, and also in the source file, so having only one is right.

It sounds like perhaps it is time to standardize this in the policy manual.

-- 
 - mdz