Re: [Haskell-cafe] Diffs for hackage

On Sat, Aug 13, 2011 at 5:18 AM, Ivan Lazar Miljenovic wrote:

On 13 August 2011 20:57, Joachim Breitner wrote:

...

Maybe it would already help to add a "changelog-file" field to .cabal, just as with license-file, and reject packages on hackage that do not have this field and file, and later decide if we need a more standardized format for changelogs.

I agree, but it would be nice to also have optional readme-file, todo-file and doc-files fields (the latter to let us avoid banging documentation in with "extra-source-files").

As for a standardised format... I'm not sure if we need to enforce a particular format, as long as it's understandable.

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.