Since last Tuesday, packages built in natty don’t come with a Debian changelog included any more. Due to the continuous demand for downsizing both our installation media, as well as the install footprint, we looked for packages which we should eliminate (duplicate libraries, unnecessary runtimes like our current effort to eliminate perl (-modules, not -base), but also for stuff that users generally don’t need and won’t miss. IMO package changelogs very much fall into the latter category, so they were very high on the “first against the wall” list.

Changelogs are of course a valuable developer tool, but for those it is usually less important to have them available locally, as long as there is a convenient method to access them. For that I wrote a helper tool “apt-changelog” which retrieves it from changelogs.ubuntu.com.

So

$ apt-changelog gnome-panel

now replaces

$ zless /usr/share/doc/gnome-panel/changelog.Debian.gz

apt-changelog is now shipped in apt-utils in Natty.

So far this was discussed pre-UDS on and at UDS in a blueprint and various hallway conversations.

However, there were some concerns, so we got a new compromise to just ship the top 10 changelog records, and add a comment about apt-changelog at the bottom. That way, the most interesting entries are still shipped, and developers and users will get used to “apt-changelog”; this will provide a smoother transition, but still get rid of about 90% of the changelog size. This is implemented by pkgbinarymangler version 81 (just uploaded).

We can re-evaluate this after the next LTS, and eventually drop them completely.

I’ll make sure that by the end of the release all packages that got built between last Tuesday and now will be rebuilt at least once and thus get their changelogs back.