cant show changelog if not directly available

[dino99]

Binary package hint: synaptic

Oneiric i386

I've seen several times this issues when checking for changelog before updating a package with synaptic:

- check for package updates
- select a package then click on "check for changelog" button ( into the bottom box describing the package); here we get two cases:
   a) the changelog is directly avaliable, so its displayed as expected
   b) the changelog request fail because of "not yet avaliable": in fact it fails because it might use an url to get the changelog, but it cant.

So these changelogs can be viewed using update-manager, but it would be nice that synaptic can perform it directly.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.10
Package: synaptic 0.75.1ubuntu2
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.0-0.1-generic-pae 3.0.0-rc2
Uname: Linux 3.0-0-generic-pae i686
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Architecture: i386
Date: Tue Jun 14 16:37:32 2011
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=fr_FR:fr:en_GB:en
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LANG=fr_FR.utf8
 LC_MESSAGES=fr_FR.utf8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: synaptic
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Jean-Baptiste Lallement (jibel)]

Thanks for your report.
Could you please provide an example ?
It should display the message with the lp url only if the changelog is not available from changelogs.ubuntu.com.

[Jean-Baptiste Lallement (jibel)]

ok, got it.

The problem is that changelogs are downloaded from changelogs.ubuntu.com which requires some time to sync. We avoid downloading from launchpad to not hammer it too much.

I see 2 solutions there:
1. Better wording of the message
2. Fallback to the launchpad URL if it is not available from changelogs.u.c, because the user will click on the link anyway and only unavailable changelogs will be accessed.

I'm setting to triaged/wishlist

[dino99 (9d9)]

Yes, instead of the actual comment saying "please see the url launchpad package path",

 replace it with a clickable url (like updatemanager does)
or : delayed those packages until you agree to download the changelog without hammering launchpad too much.