The following is taken from an email message I received from [EMAIL PROTECTED] I hope he doesn't object to my posting his email and my responses to debian-devel. I think points made here could usefully contribute to the changes file format discussion.
> In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Bill Mitchell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > Just out of curiosity, does the following represent a horribly > > formatted and human-unreadable package announcement? Except for > > the lack of a Priority field, it passes the dchanges(1) syntax check. > > I omitted it because i didn't have a good idea what to write into it. > (And I hoped that nobody will notice it ...) Perhaps I should have made it clearer that I was holding your package announcement up as an example of a readable announcement produced with dchanges(1). Personally, I thought it was very clear and readable. dchanges(1) requires a Priority field because there was one in the package announcement format example from Bruce Perens, on which dchanges(1) was based. I've been filling it in with whatever seemed to fit (e.g., Emergency, High, Routine, Low, Important, Immediate). My guess is that it's intended to be evaluated by a human. > And the Changelog is hand-edited from a GNU Changelog-formatted file. > An automatic conversion would be nice. No doubt this could be easily done, if I knew exactly what the GNU Changelog format looked like. If it's what I think it is, I'd probably indent all lines with text by one single blank, and convert totally blank lines to " ." lines. I wouldn't plan to do this, however, until the recently-reopened discussion regarding what package announcements should look like and what tools should be used to produce them is done with, and the future (or lack thereof) of the dchanges package is decided. > another BTW: How do I specify that a package should go into the > non-commercial section ? (The answer to this could belong into the > manpage.) What I've seen done, and done myself in that situation, is to include a plaintext intro in the package announcemant to the effect that "This package should go in non-free (or wherever) because ....". I haven't had occasion to do this since I fielded the dchanges package. If I did it using dchanges, I'd probably put "SECTION: non-free", or whatever, in the package Control file. I'd probably include that same information in plaintext in the debian-changes posting outside of the portion of the text imported from the changes file produced by dchanges(1) (or whatever tool replaces it).
