[Tfug] debian, debports and changelogs..

[Tom Rini]

On Tue, Oct 14, 2008 at 07:21:35AM -0500, Jeremy D Rogers wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 13, 2008 at 9:47 PM, Tom Rini <trini at kernel.crashing.org> wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, Oct 13, 2008 at 09:41:34PM -0500, Jeremy D Rogers wrote:
> >
> > > I've been tinkering with some packages from experimental (especially
> > related
> > > to xorg and the new opensource radeon drivers supporting 3d on my t60's
> > > x1300) and I have to say, being able to install from experimental by
> > using
> > > "aptitude install -t experimental <package>" is spiffy. But I always
> > assume
> > > I'm asking for trouble if I don't glance through the changelogs, so I
> > > typically hop on packages.debian.org and peruse first. That (and a
> > really
> > > bad burn from udev that hosed my laptop for 2 days) got me into the
> > habbit
> > > of doing this for normal "safe" upgrades as well, albeit only for
> > packages
> > > that I'm nervous might cause problems.
> >
> > Tangetally, 'apt-listchanges' is a wonderful package you might want to
> > install :)
> > Description: package change history notification tool
> >  The tool apt-listchanges can compare a new version of a
> >  package with the one currently installed and show what has been
> >  changed, by extracting the relevant entries from the Debian changelog
> >  and NEWS files.
> >  .
> >  It can be run on several .deb archives at a time to get a list of all
> >  changes that would be caused by installing or upgrading a group of
> >  packages. When configured as an APT plugin it will do this
> >  automatically during upgrades.
> 
> 
> That's a good tip. I've glanced at that package before but don't have it
> installed. Now I remember why. It wants to pull in exim and a whole slew of
> mail packages too. I'd rather not install all that on this laptop. Just out
> of curiosity, does it use the same info as the debian.org site? I think all
> that comes from the source deb changelogs, so I suspect that apt-listchanges
> would show the same mysterious lack of changelog for iceweasel in sid/amd64.
> If that is your arch, could you check and let me know?

First, what it actually wants is mail-transport-agent (or exim4) so you
can use esmtp or msmtp instead.  And it's a recommends since there's
other display options ($PAGER for example) But second, what it actually
uses are the changelogs in the debs themselves, so as long as the
package itself has the changelog file, you'll see something.

-- 
Tom Rini