Bug#759169: [dch] Please add the email address together with the name in square brackets

[James McCoy]

On Sun, Aug 31, 2014 at 11:25:35AM -0700, Enrico Zini wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 25, 2014 at 07:07:47PM +0200, Jakub Wilk wrote:
> 
> > >   [ Brian Nelson <pyro at debian.org> ]
> > >   * Fooed the bar
> > >
> > >   [ Luca Bruno <lucab at debian.org> ]
> > >   * Barred the foo
> > From time to time I see changelogs written in this style, and I find them
> > distracting. I hope this feature is not going to be implemented.
> > Disclaimer: IANA devscripts maintainer, just a random dch(1) user, and a
> > keen changelog reader.

I don't intend devscripts to dictate style here.  Even the existing
entry headers were only added to dch after they became fairly commonly
used among team maintained packages.

> I still don't find it fair that we fail to attribute contributions to
> the people that have made them.

We're not failing to attribute.  We're just not providing enough
information for an uninvolved party to differentiate between two people
with the same name.

> Can you think of a way of fixing the attribution problem that would be
> more acceptable to you?

Use a VCS that allows distinguishing between author and committer, or at
the very least allows maintaining authorship when applying patches from
contributors.

Not every contribution to a package is necessarily documented in
d/changelog, so I don't think using that as the definitive source of
information or reducing readability is particularly useful.

I do think your effort to increase visibility of contributions is
useful, but I'm not sure if this is the best way to go about achieving
that goal.

Cheers,
-- 
James
GPG Key: 4096R/331BA3DB 2011-12-05 James McCoy <jamessan at debian.org>
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