On Tue, May 01, 2001 at 07:56:10PM -0700, Francois Gouget wrote: > On Tue, 1 May 2001, Matt Zimmerman wrote: [...] > > I had an idea (and a working script) to extract changelogs from source > > packages and insert them into a SQL database. My original intention was to > > allow apt-listchanges to display changelogs for packages before downloading > > them, but such a database would also allow for queries like this. It would > > also allow the CGI changelog viewer to work again. > > <day-dreaming> Yum. I'd love to see the changelog in dselect before I decide > whether to upgrade a package or not. </day-dreaming> :-) > > Maybe this could be made available as part of the 'Packages' system. I don't > mind the time it would take to download all this extra information but it > should probably be optional (kind of related to people complaining the > Packages files should not contain the description).
I discussed the idea a bit with James Troup, and one of his concerns was that the database would be centralized, not distributed over many mirrors like the packages themselves. This would be a scalability problem if such a system were to become popular. Judging by the response that apt-listchanges received, and the interest people have in the idea, it just might. As you suggest above, maybe the solution is to use a file-based system rather than an interactive database query as I had envisioned. Package changelogs could be extracted from source packages and stored (compressed) in the archive somewhere. Then, retrieving the changelog for a package would be as easy as http://my.favorite.mirror/debian/dists/blah/changelogs/source_package.txt. Some changelogs, like those in the XFree86 packages, are over 60kb compressed, but most of them seem to be less than 10k, according to a quick manual survey on my system. -- - mdz
