Pacman

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Tasklist

FS#9530 - Changelog diff

Attached to Project: Pacman
Opened by Nagy Gabor (combo) - Monday, 11 February 2008, 18:49 GMT
Task Type Feature Request
Category General
Status Unconfirmed
Assigned To No-one
Architecture All
Severity Low
Priority Normal
Reported Version 3.1.1
Due in Version Undecided
Due Date Undecided
Percent Complete 0%
Votes 2
Private No

Details

Nowadays I had to play with an Ubuntu distro and I noticed that it has a very intelligent changelog handling:
I can get the difference (from changelog) between my local package and the new package in sync and I can decide whether the changes are important to me (ie. worth upgrade) or not.
[To be honest I used a GUI "upgrade manager" where select or unselect package for sysupgrade was quite easy.]

Note: this needs changelog in syncdb which would increase syncdb size (<-> KISS?). However, even if you don't like this changelog diff idea, imho people want to read the [whole?] changelog _before_ package install (changelog in localdb is mostly useful for selecting package to downgrade).
Note2: this needs strict (well defined) changelog format.
This task depends upon

Comment by Roman Kyrylych (Romashka) - Wednesday, 13 February 2008, 08:48 GMT
Changelog diff an overkill IMO.
I also don't like the idea of putting changelog in a syncdb - this will increase its size *significantly* as soon the practicee of including changelogs with packages will grow.
However I find it useful to have some way to read changelog easily from already downloaded (with -Syuw) packages (if not in pacman - then maybe some extra script).
Comment by Nagy Gabor (combo) - Friday, 15 February 2008, 12:28 GMT
"this will increase its size *significantly* as soon the practicee of including changelogs with packages will grow."
Yes. To be honest I thought that implementing changelog to _ArchLinux_ was an overkill (however pacman is not distro specific!), because it will constanstly growing in localdb as you said, and we rip off even package docs (including NEWS ;-), too. The same for syncdb (yes, I know that the speed of -Sy is important, that's why syncdbs are a bit different): again, your distro needn't use changelogs at all, then you won't get anything against KISS. <- What's more this just depends on repo-add and such tools! [So you can use changelogs, but you simply don't add them to syncdbs].

But I still think that storing changelogs only in localdb is not very useful...

So what about this compromise idea?:
OK, not store them in syncdb [but pacman should be prepared to this for other distros, see ~-Si things; anyway, this is already done in back-end imho], but add a "--loud" option to the front-end which would show the changelog diff (too) on package upgrade [this can be calculated from the .pkg.tar.gz file]. This would be just an extra information, which is imho much more interesting than watching the progressbar on upgrade (personally I would use this always to know the news).

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