[maemo-developers] maemo.org/downloads automatic updates from Extras

[From: Tim Teulings]

Hallo!

> One enhancement I would like to add is automatically update the 'Changes
> in latest version' field for the entry in downloads. I would like comments

That would be nice :-)

> from the community on how developers should supply this information.

> One option would be to fetch it from the changelog. Problems here are that
> there aren't many packages using a changelog at the moment and we would
> need to filter out the real changes from the packaging revision updates.

The debian package changelog describes changed to the package made by
the package maintainer. If maintainer and developer are different a
changelog entry for a major relase could just contain "New upstream
version" - which would not be that helpful :-/

Also normally new package revisions would generate an entry in the
changelog, however the package would have no visible change - it
would just fix bugs in the packaging or in the software (which however
could be relevant for some users!):

Another option would be to use the ChangeLog of the original source
package - this would contain upstream documentation to changes in the
original software. You would expect to find new features there.

However upstream information might contain information of varying
detail. I have seen packages that list a huge number of even internal
changes - mor elike a developer blog. So this source may also not be of
best quality, too.

Another problem is that the ChangeLog is "owned" by upstream, the
maintainer can/should not change it. It amy also not be scanable because
of varying syntax.

In the ideal world however I would always show the contains of ChangeLog
for the current upstream release and I would show changelog of the
package for package revisions > 1.

So we can try it with these files and either put preasure on upstream or
let the package maintainer fix/create these files or we can define a
special maemo-specific file Maemo.ChangeLog that contains both
information in a simple to parse, extendable file format (XML?). And to
make everybody happy we try a fallback for ChangeLog and changelog if
Maemo.Changelog does not exist - with improving magic over time.

Simple XML file could look like:

<maemo-release-changelog>
<revision release-date="2008-07-07 23:05:00" revision="<package revision>">
  <description>
    Packages new upstream version.
  </description>
</revision>

<release release-date="2008-07-01 11:55:00" version="<source package
version>">
  <description>
    Now plays funny sound on start.
  </description>
</release>
</maemo-release-changelog>

However many other formats with same or similar content are possible...

> Another option would be to let the developer enter this data while
> promoting the package to extras. We could add this step to the promotion
> interface.

IMHO a bad idea. I personally want to have the process as automatic as
possible (OK testing is still manual :-/). This way I can choose time
and place and tool and process and I'm not forced to use
the web page (must switch to dput soon :-)).

-- 
Gruß...
       Tim