Date: Tue, 24 Oct 1995 20:36:23 -0700 (PDT) From: Bill Mitchell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
I'd intended to drop this topic, but I'll belabor one point here. If package announcements are uploaded to debian.org for machine parsing and debian-changes announcements are machine-generated from there, The mechanized debian-changes announcement generator has a lot of control over the aesthetics of the announcement format which is presented to humans for reading. This is a bad idea. I don't think we should mandate that a script exist somewhere to parse the machine-readable format and generate a human-readable format from it, when we could just as easily have a format that is both human- and machine-readable and that does not require this extra step. We *must*, however, have a script that maintainers can use to generate announcements. dchanges could be adapted to generate a human-readable format instead of the currently-used format. At the moment, the format it uses appears to contain all of the right information, but it doesn't arrange it in a manner that is easily readable by humans. And while I do agree that it would be a good idea for the archive maintainer (me) to moderate debian-changes to prevent announcements from being distributed before the announced package is moved into public view, I must urge restraint in automating the process. All packages should be inspected and moved into the distribution by a human. I am strongly of that opinion.
