On Wed, May 11, 2016 at 01:54:04PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote: > If someone has time and willingness, reviewing the contents of NEWS.Debian > across all packages for the stable -> testing delta before the release > sounds like a very useful thing to do.
>From what I've seen, this is very close to our problem with Recommends: -- those pointless NEWS.Debian _do_ make sense "locally" -- for a direct user of the package in question. If you're, say, coding something with a library, you're interested when that library changed its API in an incompatible way. On the other hand, if you merely use something that depends on the library, you couldn't care less. > A great volunteer task to help with the release! I'm afraid we'd need to come up with some guidelines first, especially with the above issue in mind. You can for start with packages you have installed: zless /usr/share/doc/*/NEWS.Debian* adequate only for a direct user alsa-utils only for a direct user amd64-microcode niche news apt probably valid apt-listchanges sneakily worded "won't work in common situations" autoconf only for a direct user (API changes) btrbk valid -- everyone needs to rewrite their configs ca-certificates spam that belongs in the changelog ccache not relevant (old data will silently expire anyway) chrony valid. Multiple entries, of varying relevance. llvm-* changelog material coreutils niche news cron niche news curl spam d-conf only for a direct user dctrl-tools spam (apt does this 100% transparently) debian-keyring very niche news devscripts minor behaviour change dirmngr only for a direct user docbook-xsl speculation about future changes... doomsday documenting a bug (one that's easy to fix with some debugging) ceve niche ever for a direct user dosfstools documents a likely breakage, not interesting for a non-user exim4 relevant for an admin, spam for those who don't know what a MTA is exo a restart-on-upgrade quirk findutils niche news fonts-vlgothic file rename, 99.9% users use it via fontconfig anyway... wine valid gconf a restart-on-upgrade quirk [here I got bored] As you can see, most of the news are relevant only for an immediate user while being utterly pointless for those who installed package X only via a dependency. But, how do you tell them apart? What about the case you both use X directly and as a dependency? And it needs to be stressed: being relevant only for an immediate users means the news is still _relevant_ for them. -- How to exploit the Bible for weight loss: Pr28:25: he that putteth his trust in the ʟᴏʀᴅ shall be made fat.
