Ideally I must agree with Cristian here. On 29 August 2012 13:42, Dominique Leuenberger a.k.a DimStar <DimStar@opensuse.org> wrote:
Dear Factory contributors and packagers,
As openSUSE 12.2 is frozen and Factory is 'open to go wild' again, I would like to announce that the packaging guidelines have some extensions (not really new) that will be stricter enforced than they used to be.
Currently a common rule to be 'ignored' or packagers are not aware is around the topics of: - .Changes entries - Patches
First, the .changes entry (rpm changelog) surves two purposes:
And each purpose has a different audience. It only makes sense to split them.
- News for the user - History tracking of packaging changes (often referenced in bugs to verify if a user has the latest packaging bugfixeS).
A simple "Update to version x.y.z" is, as before, not accepted. There should be some buzz around the update for the user; some major reasons to the upgrade should be listed
And not extra information that the user doesn't care about but distracts him from what he really cares. OTOH sure, the OBS interface is not the best to check the history. And nobody is telling what patches are added/removed in the commit messages neither. Anyway I don't think it's too much work. The only stupid thing that really slows me is manually changing the line length when copying the NEWS file to the .changes file. There is any automated help for this? Could the line length restriction be removed?
Changes on the package itself should be mentioned in a way that any other contributor to the same package can follow traces of why something is the way it is. Commonly, Added (build)dependencies are interesting to be seen, special hacks to make something work in a particular way [..]: Always consider that package maintenance is a distributed task and various contributors need to be able to step up at will.
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. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-packaging+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-packaging+owner@opensuse.org