* Cristian Morales Vega
First, the .changes entry (rpm changelog) surves two purposes:
And each purpose has a different audience. It only makes sense to split them.
I agree, both should be kept in the metadata since it would be very useful to be able to display the major (enduser-relevant) changes via zypper/YaST before installing a new version of a package.
Patches: The rules about patches are listed at http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Packaging_Patches_guidelines . Most prominent is likely the mentioning of the patches life cycle, which forces you to mention additions and removals of patches in the changelog. As history shows, this can be helpful if a patch got removed, and later a regression is reported; finding out when a patch was removed can be crucial in reconstructing feature sets (including contacting the contributor that dropped it.. which is easily extracted from the .changes if listed)
More important than the .changes content IMHO is the "# PATCH-*" line. It forces people to report bugs upstream, and the reference to the bug report is priceless.
Making patch tags mandatory would be again very useful since they are easily machine-parseable and could be read and displayed in OBS in order to get a quick overview on the purpose and status of all patches of a particular package. Right now I'm using my own script to generate a HTML patch report for all of my packages. There are way too many packages which have obscure foo.dif patches without any explanation whatsoever neither inline, in the spec or changelog. This makes packages practically only maintainable by the person who created them. -- Guido Berhoerster -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-packaging+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-packaging+owner@opensuse.org