On Thu, May 12, 2016 at 10:32:57AM +0200, Jonas Smedegaard wrote: > Quoting Adam Borowski (2016-05-12 08:16:29) > > 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. > > Perhaps that could be addressed by extending apt-listchanges with an > option to take the APT auto-install flag into account (man apt-mark) and > skip packages that are flagged as auto-installed.
Alas, it's not that easy: * a part of packages in the sample I looked at have NEWS.Debian that are relevant even if you don't use the package directly (but have it installed) * being auto-installed doesn't mean you don't use the package. Things like devscripts, exim4, autoconf are pulled as dependencies yet I for one use them directly. -- A tit a day keeps the vet away.
