package change history is often incomplete

[Scott Kitterman]

The version history is a history of the versions that actually landed in Ubuntu, but leaves out intermediate versions and revisions that were never in Ubuntu. This presents an incomplete history of the package.

As a result, the current package source page history is in many cases useless for trying to understand differences between releases. In order to be useful, it must be complete.

[Celso Providelo (cprov)]

I suspect you are talking about the new source package page provided by soyuz, but without URLs or examples it becomes very hard to identify what is exactly the *issue*.

[Scott Kitterman (kitterman)]

Yes.

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pypolicyd-spf

As an example, it's missing 0.4-1.

This will (AFAICT) be true for any package version that was not in Ubuntu. For some packages it misses a lot.

A more involved example is:

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/eclipse

Compare this to:

http://changelogs.ubuntu.com/changelogs/pool/universe/e/eclipse/eclipse_3.2.2-3ubuntu3/changelog

And you will find many revisions missing. Including the one that changed the jvm Eclipse is using (3.2.2-2) and all of the Debian 3.2.1 revisions.

[Emilio Pozuelo Monfort (pochu)]

This could be related:

This sync included 3 lintian versions, 1.23.4[345], but only 1.23.45 is listed in the lintian history:

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/hardy-changes/2008-February/007923.html
https://edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/lintian/

[Celso Providelo (cprov)]

I'm unsure about what is exactly the change being requested here ?

Surely, ubuntu distribution only knows about uploads made to it, it doesn't introspect the uploaded changelogs looking for versions done elsewhere (mainly because it doesn't necessarily know what they could be).

The pages you mentioned talk about version 'in Ubuntu' and the UI should be clear about it.

On debian syncs (manual or automatic) I think the 'packaged' history should be clearly mentioned in the ubuntu version changelog.

As a speculation point, now that Launchpad knows debian sources [1], we could certainly perform more precise syncs and even point to 'packaged' history in a more reliable way.

Maybe we will have an opportunity to discuss this during UDS.

[1] https://edge.launchpad.net/debian/

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for Launchpad itself because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

[Scott Kitterman (kitterman)]

If you look at debian/changelong is a package, that is the "Full Changelog" of the package, not the incomplete subset LP displays. I don't understand what is confusing about that?

[William Grant (wgrant)]

We store debian/changelog in the librarian now. We can easily present that like we do debian/copyright.