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From: jandrm on 1 Apr 2010 20:35
Hi fellows,

Is there any way in zypper, yast, or rpm tool to read a package's change log
before installing it?

Seems like the changes are only shown for the currently installed version of
the package. Would be nice to read the change log and decide if I care about
the upgrade enuf to do it.


From: Rajko M. on 2 Apr 2010 01:03
jandrm wrote:

> Would be nice to read the change log and decide if I care about
> the upgrade enuf to do it.

houghi explained that well enough.

The change log and few other pieces of information, that are missing for
packages that are not installed, are not included to keep repo meta
information smaller and download of that information shorter.

There was talk about creating another file that will be downloaded on user
demand, like when you asked for change logs, but it seems that there is not
such feature requested in http://features.opensuse.org/ , at least I
couldn't find it.

IMO, demand for such thing is not that big, and reasons are explained in
houghi's post. If you have installed software then better make update. Guys
in openSUSE security team are good at what they do. BTW, that is one of
reasons I use openSUSE and not something else.

--
Regards Rajko,
From: jandrm on 2 Apr 2010 03:46
Ok thanks guys. And I should point out I was more referring to use of
packages in experimental or dev repositories. rpm changelog can be
interesting.

I do trust the security updates and usually there is a pretty good
description for those.


Rajko M. wrote:

> jandrm wrote:
>
>> Would be nice to read the change log and decide if I care about
>> the upgrade enuf to do it.
>
> houghi explained that well enough.
>
> The change log and few other pieces of information, that are missing for
> packages that are not installed, are not included to keep repo meta
> information smaller and download of that information shorter.
>
> There was talk about creating another file that will be downloaded on user
> demand, like when you asked for change logs, but it seems that there is
> not such feature requested in http://features.opensuse.org/ , at least I
> couldn't find it.
>
> IMO, demand for such thing is not that big, and reasons are explained in
> houghi's post. If you have installed software then better make update.
> Guys in openSUSE security team are good at what they do. BTW, that is one
> of reasons I use openSUSE and not something else.
>

From: 1jam on 3 Apr 2010 20:20
Vlad_Inhaler wrote:
>>ory, downloaded from there and everything worked again.
>
> Back to the original question, since the problem was apparently in the
> dependencies (one was allegedly missing), changelogs would not have
> helped in the slightest.
> Life is too short to spend it looking at Changelogs.

Hi, well, for example I like to monitor package kwin closely. The desktop
effects have been quirky and buggy over time and I like to see what latest
changes and fixes are. The changelog is quite useful to see what is
happening with the package. So for me, I like to keep an eye on it.

Sure, average users, shouldn't be interested much by it. But I am.
From: Vlad_Inhaler on 4 Apr 2010 03:48
On Apr 3, 4:48 pm, houghi <hou...(a)houghi.org.invalid> wrote:
> Vlad_Inhaler wrote:
> > There have been updates which have seriously broken things.
>
> I know in that waythat I heard from them. I myself was not affected.
> They are few and far between. I perhaps should have mentioned them.
>
> > A couple of years back there was a kernel update which was supplanted
> > by another a day later because it rendered some systems unbootable,
> > that one did not affect my system.
>
> I asume I was not affected because I do not do the kernels update
> automagically. It was one I heard about as well.
>
> > A year or so ago, Seamonkey was rendered totally unuseable by a
> > security update.  That one hit me hard.  I ended up having to download
> > and reinstall the previous version for 3 machines (1 x 32bit, 2 x
> > 64bit to make it worse) and then say 'no' to all updates of that
> > particular package.  In the end I went to the experimental Mozilla
> > repository, downloaded from there and everything worked again.
>
> I did not hear about that one. I even have to look up what that program
> does. ;-)

I looked that one up again. There is a thread "SM 1.1.16 crashes on
OpenSUSE 11.1" on the mozilla.support.seamonkey newsgroup, hosted at
news.mozilla.org, 25-June 2009. The missing package was libstdc++.so.
5 (.so.6 was installed). Having said that, the only thing that worked
for me was to upgrade to the experimental mozilla repository packages.

Postings to news.mozilla.org newsgroups do not expire ;-)


>
> > Back to the original question, since the problem was apparently in the
> > dependencies (one was allegedly missing), changelogs would not have
> > helped in the slightest.
>
> In neither case. One could even say that if I would have looked at the
> changelogs, I might have been affected as well as I might have thought
> that I needed the kernel update and do it while I did not now and might
> not even have actually needed it.
>
> > Life is too short to spend it looking at Changelogs.
>
> 2 problems (there might have been others) in all the years I use
> openSUSE is not a serious issue to me. I did much worse myself. :-D
> So I can only agree here.
>
> That said, I do not like the way the kernel updates are done. I think
> that there should always be (at least) two kernels that are bootable.
> One standard that you can go to at all time and one 'latest' one with
> all the security updates. That way if anything goes wrong, you will
> always have a kernel to go back to.
>
> Unfortunmatly I know so little about kernels that me yelling that will
> be drowned by others saying why it can't be done or why it is a bad
> idea. And I would have no other optio then to accept that. I know it is
> not true, but I can't back it up. :-(
>
> Once saw it and it had to do something with the init and always having
> the need of all the drivers twice or something like that.
>
> houghi
> --
> It's people. Source code is made out of people! They're making our
> source out of people. Next thing they'll be breeding us like cattle
> for code. You've  gotta tell them. You've gotta tell them!

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