rawhide report: 20110129 changes

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Sat, Jan 29, 2011 at 10:58:59AM -0500, Orcan Ogetbil wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 29, 2011 at 9:34 AM, Clyde E. Kunkel wrote:
> > On 01/29/2011 09:21 AM, Jason L Tibbitts III wrote:
> >>> New package: ghc-process-leksah-1.0.1.4-2.fc15
> >>>              Haskell process-leksah library
> >>
> >> Is it not possible to try a little harder to write a useful package
> >> summary?  Or for the package reviewer to take just a quick look and
> >> notice that a summary such as that is pretty much completely useless?
> >>
> >>   - J<
> >
> >
> > Yes, please.  Also, "new upstream version" as the only summary is not
> > useful either.
> 
> By summary, do you mean the %changelog entry? That entry represents
> the changelog of the specfile/srpm, which is different than the
> changelog of the software.

In the Fedora case the RPM %changelog is redundant, because the same
information should be in Fedora git.

> While it is perfectly fine to write "new upstream version" to the
> %changelog of the specfile, the software changelog can (and perhaps
> should) go to the Notes section in bodhi.

This is how _I'd_ make it work if I had lots of time:

In RPM you'd mark some file or repository as being the upstream
changelog of the package (a bit like %doc):

    %changelog ChangeLog
or  %changelog git://git.annexia.org/git/libguestfs.git

The current RPM %changelog section would be obsolete.  Instead the
(Fedora) git repository changelog would be somehow copied into the
RPM.

The Bodhi notes section would be prepopulated (again "somehow") from
the %changelog (ie. upstream changelog) of the SRPM.  However it would
allow the notes to be edited down by the packager if they wished:

notes =
  version 1.9.7 released
  perl: Ignore internal_* functions in POD coverage test.
  Fix test-guestfish-a.sh regression test for new trace format.
  autobuild: Add a 'make clean' step.

which the package might edit down to:

notes =
  version 1.9.7 contains changes to the build environment,
  regression tests and perl documentation

(or they could leave it alone, in which case it would still be valid,
albeit a bit long-winded and technical).

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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