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

[Andreas Barth]

* Matt Zimmerman (mdz at debian.org) [060821 08:44]:
> 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.

from dh_installchangelogs manpage:
| debian/package.NEWS files can also be used.

So, dh_installchangelogs has a default (and that is to share the files),
but maintainers can decide different on a (binary) package to package
basis - which sounds sensible to me.

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

I agree to that.


Cheers,
Andi
-- 
  http://home.arcor.de/andreas-barth/