On Fri, 1 Dec 2017 00:04:20 +0100 Bill Allombert <ballo...@debian.org> wrote: > Both the content and the name of the upstream changelogs is an upstream > issue. The fact that a file is named by upstream Changelog instead of > NEWS does not imply anything on its usefulness. It might even happen > that NEWS is the real changelog.
That's certainly possible, though not a particularly good or conventional practice. But using NEWS for user-visible release notes rather than a full source-code changelog seems a sufficiently common practice to make it the default assumption, which a source package could override if necessary. > The fact that some upstream do not bother to ship useful changelog does > not mean that all changelog are useless, and by removing them we > discourage upstream of producing useful changelog. I sincerely hope so. Convincing upstreams to "git rm ChangeLog" becomes much easier the more widespread existing practice we can point to. Having a ChangeLog file in version control is actively detrimental. I would go so far as to say that I hope we one day stop shipping a non-generated debian/changelog in source packages, because it incurs all the same pain. Now, a NEWS file or similar, containing user-visible *release notes* and similar highlights, would most certainly be useful. I would love to see *more* upstreams providing files like those. But those certainly aren't changelogs. - Josh Triplett
