Re: [Haskell-cafe] Diffs for hackage

On Sat, Aug 13, 2011 at 8:13 AM, Joachim Breitner wrote:

Hi,

Am Sonntag, den 14.08.2011, 00:29 +1000 schrieb Ivan Lazar Miljenovic:

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On 14 August 2011 00:25, David Fox wrote:

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Debian's packaging has a very strict changelog format where each entry combines a log entry with the package name, the version number, the author's name and email, and the date.  This creates a very nice, centralized, authoritative source for these pieces of information that can't be accidentally omitted or allowed to become stale.

Is this for the actual Debian packages, or even for source tarballs that they get from upstream?

it’s for the packaging work, here is an example: http://packages.debian.org/changelogs/pool/main/g/ghc/ghc_7.0.4-4/changelog

But I think David is suggesting to adapt a similarly formatted changelog file for Cabal packages, e.g. to display them on hackage. I am all for that, as long as it does not prevent the introduction of changelogs (e.g. by excessive bikeshedding or by having people lose interest again).

If anyone wants to take a look, there is a parser for Debian's changelog format in the debian package, module Debian.Changes: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/debian