Re: RPM's are bad

[jgotts linuxsavvy com]

In message <Pine SOL 4 21 0010241349230 14846-100000 muppet17 cs chalmers se>, 
Dennis Bjorklund writes:

> - 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.

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

Another good example is a recent PostgreSQL RPM that shipped with a directory
with insecure permissions.  It was a security bug and 100% a packaging error.
The fix would be logged in the RPM changelog and the end user would understand
why the version was bumped, e.g. from -2 to -3.

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

Overall, I vote to keep the changelogs.  The only benefit from removing or
trimming them is that it makes it a little bit easier for people who aren't
good with their editor to modify spec files.  Small benefit!  Disk space is
cheap and removing credit for people's hard work is highly inappropriate.

John

--
John GOTTS <jgotts linuxsavvy com>  http://www.linuxsavvy.com/staff/jgotts