Re: RPM's are bad

[Dennis Bjorklund <dennisb cs chalmers se>]

On Tue, 24 Oct 2000 jgotts linuxsavvy com wrote:

> > - added spanish and french translations for rpm
> 
> >I can't see any resons (sic) why you would like to present that changelog to
> >the enduser.
> 
> I grab a binary RPM from updates.redhat.com but don't install it yet.  I'd
> like to know what changed first.  So I use the changelog feature of rpm to see
> if this release fixes my particular bug.

Yes, but you wont se any notes about bugs in the program that are
fixed. You will only see bugs in the spec-file that have been fixed, or
maybe som new things that where added to the spec-file.

> Oh, hey, now my Spanish and French users have documentation.  I will install
> this RPM after all.

In this case that changelog was from the latest version of gnome-core
1.2.3, and there where 6 entries there. The first from mars 1988. And the
entry you like, itwhere from november 1988. The entry before, from
september 1988, said: Built 0.30 release.

So I don't think you are very interested in these entries.

So 'm not saying that changelogs in general should go. I would like really
out of date changelogs to go and I would like thes changelog to reflect
what really have happend to the program and not to the spec file.

I also think it is nice if you can just take and rpm-file and look at the
changelog without installing the program and looking for the NEWS
file. But even that is okay. But having out of date and not update
changelogs is a bit stupid.

> RPM changelogs also give the end user some inkling about new features that have
> been added to a package.

Well. What kind of features would that be? 

Are you taking of features of the program or features of the
spec-file. Presenting a changelog for the spec-file to the end-user is
something I don't understand. Why not having a changelog for the readme
file also since endusers might want to know what changes have been done to
that also..

ps. Have anyone been able to build gnome-core with the spec files that
where included? I had to write my own.

/Dennis