[Pkg-owncloud-maintainers] Changelog, version tracking, distro notes

[Paul van Tilburg]

Hi all,

I wanted to address a few issues.  But before that, I wanted to say that
I really appreciate the existence of this list and the fact that
upstream takes time to deal with the wishes of distributions.
I can assure you, this is not always the case.

Changelog
---------

I wonder if the Changelog, now only publicly reachable via the main
website, could be included in the upcoming release tarballs?  It would
be greatly appreciated. :)

Release watch
-------------

Another matter is that Debian employs a watch system to track new
upstream.

Firstly, although the "ownCloud for Debian" team surely tracks new
releases, the information is used in a QA-context and to warn us if we
are slacking as a team.  :)
Secondly, the watch systems allows automatic downloading of the release
tarball and repacking if necessary.  At the moment we repack the
original tarball by removing 3rdparty/timepicker/css/include as it
contains minified, sourceless JavaScript libs that do not seem to be
used by ownCloud (that is, after removal the time picker still works
fine). 

Currently, the watch does not work, as there is no page that lists
release tarballs.  Access to http://owncloud.org/releases/ is forbidden,
and http://owncloud.org/support/download/ uses a redirect URL to the
tarball, thus hiding the version.  I wonder if a list of releases
could be made publicly visible somewhere for convenience, given that
Gitorious already offers this in a more VCS-style fashion anyway.
I think it might be worthwhile to have it include tarballs of older
releases as well, however, one might consider that that is irrelevant
nowadays given Gitorious and the like.

Distro Notes
------------

Now that ownCloud 4.0.1 is available in Debian unstable and soon in
Wheezy, later to be the new Debian stable release, I wonder if someone
could update the "Distro Notes" page [1] to also list Debian. 
If any explanatory text is needed, for example explaining how to use
different DB backends, we would be happy to help out.  Some text is
already present in [2].  I've noted that the "Install" page [3] says
something about running "apt-get install <things>", which is rather
distro-specific (Debian/Ubuntu/Mint/…).  Maybe this stuff also needs to
be moved to the "Distro Notes" page, updated, and the "Install" page
should just explain what to install if you bypass the distribution?
Just my 2 cents, though.

1: http://owncloud.org/support/download/
2: http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-owncloud/owncloud.git;a=blob;f=debian/owncloud.README.Debian

Cheers,

Paul

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