Please generate the ChangeLog file also for snapshots

[Russ Allbery]

Julien ÉLIE <julien at trigofacile.com> writes:

> Following a discussion from last year, it is now the right time to
> handle that request while updating snapshot generation.

My feeling on this is that the Debian package shouldn't include the raw
changelog.  It's potentially huge and it feels like a waste of space.  We
maintain a fairly complete NEWS file that should already mention anything
that people using INN need to know about what changed, and that's the
useful file to install in the Debian package.

Most Debian packages don't contain detailed changelog files in their
documentation because most upstreams don't generate them and when they do
they're often huge and not very useful.  We've been doing this for a long
time, but the world has moved on from this approach to documenting changes
in favor of encouraging people to clone the Git repository and run git
commands themselves if they care about the details of specific
line-by-line changes.  99% of the important information is in NEWS,
already summarized for people to easily understand.

I'd lke to drop ChangeLog generation from releases as well.  I know there
were some objections here the last time I said that, but they seemed
strange to me (IIRC, someone said they only read ChangeLog files because
they don't trust NEWS files to be meaningful and, well, okay, but I don't
think that's a good reason for us to do extra work to ship a ChangeLog
file given that our NEWS file is meaningful).

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)             <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

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