Bug 508503

The problem is that the %ChangeLog section in the .rpm is supposed to look like this:

* Mon Feb 02 2009 - Bastien Nocera <bnocera> - 0.10.13-2
- Patch for overflows in the QT demuxer (#481267)

and instead, spot has dropped the version tag, so something like this:

* Mon Feb 02 2009 - Bastien Nocera <bnocera>
- Patch for overflows in the QT demuxer (#481267)

This violates the Fedora rpm standards.

PackageKit uses the package version data in the ChangeLog to only show the user what changed between the version they have installed, and the new version, rather than a huge list of commits that go back several years.

I suggest you poke spot, and ask him to add back the version numbers in the ChangeLog. Thanks.

Well, yes, I did screw up the versioning, but it is worth noting that an exception has been granted to the Fedora kernel, which does not do this.

The schema of:

* Mon Jan 01 2001 John Doe <email> - 1.2.3-1
- Message text

Is not standardized. In fact, rpm ignores everything after the email address, everything else that Fedora does there is overloading the field, so PK probably shouldn't assume it is ever there.

(In reply to comment #2)
> Well, yes, I did screw up the versioning, but it is worth noting that an
> exception has been granted to the Fedora kernel, which does not do this.

Right, although I'm not sure I agree with this.

> The schema of:
> 
> * Mon Jan 01 2001 John Doe <email> - 1.2.3-1
> - Message text
> 
> Is not standardized.

99% of packages in Fedora seem to do it. Maybe we should standardise it.

> In fact, rpm ignores everything after the email address,
> everything else that Fedora does there is overloading the field, so PK probably
> shouldn't assume it is ever there.  

So how is PK only supposed to show the relevant ChangeLog entries? Without the version information we would show the whole changelog, which for some packages is many, many years of commits.

When I say that it is not standardized, I mean that it is not standardized in RPM.

Fedora has several standardized changelog formats:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/Guidelines#Changelogs

All of them include the Version-Release somewhere, because there is value in having that information embedded, with the notable exception of the kernel package. (I still feel that they should be doing so as well, but I don't want to pick fights with the folks who have better things to do.)

However, as PK is intended to be distribution independent, the key point is that other RPM distributions do not use the V-R in the changelog in the same way as we do, and RPM doesn't enforce its use. PK should gracefully fail if it doesn't find an understood format.

Alternately, there is also value in having RPM standardize a single changelog format with V-R, but this would be significant change in behavior, and I'd defer to RPM upstream as to whether they're interested in that or not.

(In reply to comment #4)
> However, as PK is intended to be distribution independent, the key point is
> that other RPM distributions do not use the V-R in the changelog in the same
> way as we do, and RPM doesn't enforce its use. PK should gracefully fail if it
> doesn't find an understood format.

Oh, it only tries to parse the header like this in the yum backend. PK couldn't care less what the text format is.

> Alternately, there is also value in having RPM standardize a single changelog
> format with V-R, but this would be significant change in behavior, and I'd
> defer to RPM upstream as to whether they're interested in that or not.  

Panu? Is this worth proposing?

> In fact, rpm ignores everything after the email address

Rpm doesn't ignore what comes after the email address. Whatever is after the email address becomes part of the email address - just a random example:

[pmatilai@localhost rpm]$ rpm -q --qf "[%{changelogname}\n]" sqlite|head -5
Dennis Gilmore <dennis> - 3.6.12-3
Panu Matilainen <pmatilai> - 3.6.12-2
Panu Matilainen <pmatilai> - 3.6.12-1
Fedora Release Engineering <rel-eng.org> - 3.6.10-4
Panu Matilainen <pmatilai> - 3.6.10-3

This is a truly ancient rpm bug that's widely abused for adding evr information after the email address, as it *looks* "ok" with the default --changelog output. 
It's so widely abused that making it an error is not really an option, the options are basically either
a) Silently ignore everything after the email address
b) Store it into a new tag (RPMTAG_CHANGELOGEVR or whatever) if present

Making it a strict requirement would simply break 99% of the spec files for not a very good reason (as this is after all just FYI data, unlike in .deb where it's the version in changelog that controls the version+release of the entire package). But no, I'm not opposed to either a) or b) with b) being slightly more useful than a).

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Still happening with gnome-packagekit-2.28.3-0.1.20091211git.fc12.i686, e.g.:

Could not parse header: 'Jonathan G. Underwood <jonathan.underwood>', expected: 'Firstname Lastname <email> - version-release'

Panu, could you please create RPMTAG_CHANGELOGEVR -- then PackageKit can do sane things (only showing the changelog of what you've got installed to the update version) rather than showing the whole changelog since the start of time.

Parsing the release from the end of the mail address is like Tom said, a hack, but we need a solution. The alternative is to just not show ChangeLog data if a package does not have the - version.release tags, although that means we get a blank "details" box for a large number of packages.

This bug appears to have been reported against 'rawhide' during the Fedora 14 development cycle.
Changing version to '14'.

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(Please note: Our normal process is to give advanced warning of this 
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Although we aim to fix as many bugs as possible during every release's 
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