Manual updating CHANGES-YYYY considered harmful ;-)

[Aleksey Cheusov <cheusov%tut.by@localhost>]

As far as I can see in pkgsrc-changes@ CHANGES-YYYY file is updated
by persons who maintain pkgsrc packages.
But why you all do this by hand???
Manual updating this sort of things is full of errors
and IMO is just a stupid and unnecessary work and
waste of developer's time.

In my view it is MUCH better to use automated tools here.

Example (there are other equivalent variant):

  export BMAKE=/usr/pkg/bin/bmake # not for NetBSD
  export PSS_SLAVES=+6 # 6 parallel subprocesses for 4-core SMP machine.

  export PKGSRCDIR=/usr/pkgsrc-2008Q1
  pkg_list_all_pkgs |
    pkg_src_summary -f 'PKGNAME PKGPATH CVS_CHECKSUM' \
       > pkg_src_summary-2008Q1.txt

  export PKGSRCDIR=/usr/pkgsrc-2008Q2
  pkg_list_all_pkgs |
    pkg_src_summary -f 'PKGNAME PKGPATH CVS_CHECKSUM' \
       > pkg_src_summary-2008Q2.txt

  pkg_cmp_summary -p pkg_src_summary-2008Q1.txt \
                     pkg_src_summary-2008Q2.txt > CHANGES-2008Q2

Of course this is wip/pkg_summary-utils ;-) And of course
pkg_cmp_summary gives you an information about upgrades and
downgrades, removed and newly appeared packages and about packages
changed in CVS but with no changes in version.


Some time ago there were a discussion about PKG_EPOCH (thread: 2008Q1
-> current: downgrade).  My argument about unseen number of downgrades
for the last five years was silently ignored.

  http://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-pkg/2008/05/22/msg000964.html

Folks! Updating CHANGES-YYYY file manually you just HAVE NO CONTROL
over packages' versions at all.

-- 
Best regards, Aleksey Cheusov.