Trimming (or obsoleting) %changelog?

[Michael Schwendt]

On Wed, 17 Apr 2013 11:25:17 +1000, Dan Fruehauf wrote:

> I tend to be against trimming. I was just looking at the binutils changelog
> (goes back to 1997):
> $ rpm -q --changelog binutils | wc -c
> 54984
> 
> That's around 50K, and compressed (RPMs are compressed):
> $ rpm -q --changelog binutils | gzip | wc -c
> 15552
> 
> 15K is nothing. Really. I like to see the whole history of a package, it's
> nice and fun.

"Fun"? Maybe. "Nice"? Not always. The amount of irrelevant details can be
problematic and inconvenient when searching in the %changelog. And all you
find is a ten-year-old entry from an era when the package suffered from
the same/similar bug or was packaged very differently. Other entries would
refer to stuff not being available anymore, such as previous sub-packages,
previous builds, patched features that have been dropped years later,
retired bug trackers (e.g. bugzilla.fedora.us and its ticket numbers).

It should be up the packager(s) to decide when the package and the packaged
software have changed so much that old cruft in the %changelog could be
pruned.

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