[Pkg-gmagick-im-team] Bug#628007: imagemagick: inappropriate use of NEWS.Debian

[Colin Watson]

Package: imagemagick
Version: 8:6.6.9.7-2
Severity: normal

imagemagick (8:6.6.9.7-1) experimental; urgency=low

  Imagemagick supply configuration file under /etc

 -- Bastien Roucariès <roucaries.bastien+debian at gmail.com>  Sun, 01 May 2011 13:43:12 +0200

This is not a useful NEWS.Debian entry.  It doesn't seem particularly
newsworthy, and it doesn't look like it's been proofread by a native
English speaker (debian-l10n-english at lists.debian.org is available for
such things, I understand).  Even if it were newsworthy, it isn't
detailed enough to be useful to users reading it: where is the
configuration file?  Fiddling around in your git repository tells me
that it's somewhere under /etc/ImageMagick/, but none of your packages
ship any files there (though I suppose that's #627981) so I don't see
how anyone could be expected to know that.

I would suggest that newsworthiness here should be gauged by whether the
typical imagemagick user has to do anything about it.  If it's merely a
new optional feature, it doesn't need to go in NEWS.Debian.  NEWS.Debian
was meant for things like notes of things that have changed in an
upgrade that the user may need to respond to (see e.g.
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2003/07/msg00286.html).  If it's
used excessively, then the volume will be too much for users to wade
through on upgrades and so the facility will become useless.

Thanks,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at debian.org]