Discussion about the 'changelog' option from PKGBUILD

thiagowfx · 2014-04-28 03:58:33

Hi people,

I am curious about the changelog option of PKGBUILD[1]. I don't remember seeing many packages (if any!) using that option.

I stumbled upon this when I viewed the feh[2] PKGBUILD[3], which has just been updated. This PKGBUILD doesn't use such option, but feh ships with a changelog file:

thiago@arch ~ $ head /usr/share/doc/feh/ChangeLog       
Sun, 27 Apr 2014 20:28:02 +0200  Daniel Friesel <derf+feh@finalrewind.org>

* Release v2.11
    * Patch by Michael Vorburger: Fix erroneous free() in case of failed
      scandir (closes #140, #147)
    * Patch by rangerer: --randomize: re-randomize after list is through
      (closes #154)
    * When setting a wallpaper from a URL, do not try to store it as
      absolute path in .fehbg (closes #153)
    * Add --scroll-step <px> option to change scroll_{up,left,down,right}

Well, the specific question about feh is: should I file a bug report about this?

Now, about changelogs in general: should we care about this feature?

From the packages I currently have installed, I found that only 7 of them use the changelog option. You can quickly count yours with:

thiago@arch ~ $ pacman -Qc > output; grep -v 'no changelog' output | grep 'Changelog for'
Changelog for gdal:
Changelog for geos:
Changelog for kchmviewer:
Changelog for libgeotiff:
Changelog for powertop:
Changelog for proj:
Changelog for spotify:

(a couple of error messages also appears, from packages without changelogs in their PKGBUILDs).

[1]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PKGBUILD#changelog
[2]: https://www.archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/feh/
[3]: https://projects.archlinux.org/svntogit … ckages/feh

There is also an old discussion here[4].

[4]: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=70557

From Allan's response on #13, I had an idea: what if pacman -Qc (or similar), instead of showing the changelog pointed out in the PKGBUILD, showed us the last commit(s) from our official SVN repo? Would be relevant to open a new feature request on the bugtracker with this idea?

Last edited by thiagowfx (2014-04-28 03:59:41)

Arch Linux

#1 2014-04-28 03:58:33

Discussion about the 'changelog' option from PKGBUILD

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