[Haskell-cafe] Request for Changelogs

[Neil Mitchell]

Hi

> I’m involved in packaging Haskell stuff for Debian. Now, the Debian
> tools we have for that tell me „Hlint has a new version, 1.6.5, which is
> newer than the one you packages, 1.6.4.
>
> Huh, nice. What has changed? Is it relevant for Debian? Is it worth a
> new upload? There is no easy way to find out:

I went to my bug tracker, which informs me that:

http://code.google.com/p/ndmitchell/issues/detail?id=206
http://code.google.com/p/ndmitchell/issues/detail?id=208

Were both fixed in this release. I don't think this is a practical way
for people to find out what gets fixed, since it was rather difficult
to get the information out, but it is the answer if you were
interested in this case.

> http://community.haskell.org/~ndm/darcs/hlint/ also has no web frontend.
>
> Which leaves me with the option of getting the darcs repo and looking
> through "darcs changes". If I know of a repository for the package.

I also don't tag the darcs version when I make a release - I probably should...

> So please, package authors, put Changes files in your packages and keep
> the current for now.

The problem is that this is the kind of dull administration stuff that
isn't coding in Haskell, so tends to get neglected. If I know there is
a user demand for a changelog I'm happy to provide one, but I don't
want to waste time on something that isn't useful. For people who have
a near zero-upgrade cost (anyone who is using Cabal) I'd suggest they
upgrade to all of my packages immediately. For this change, I'd say it
probably isn't worth rolling a new debian binary unless it's
particularly easy.

I will start a changelog in hlint - and for some of my projects
(tagsoup) I do include a changelog in the user manual.

Thanks

Neil