I often write changelogs such as * lun nov 26 2007 Nicolas Mailhot <nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net> ☺ 20070415-3 ✓ Tested public release ✓ Fixed foo problem ☠ 20070415-1 ✓ First experimental packaging I feel it is totally compliant with the third form on http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/Guidelines#Changelogs It's nice to be able to chain versions under a single date when needed The special character is there both to mark a version string and to show how confident I'm in a particular release It works fine for everyone, the changelogs are clear, and users happy. Not so for rpmlint. rpmlint really wants the a version line to be -<space><version> and not <any_character><space><version> I'd be nice to relax the rpmlint check, as forcing - does not really help anyone, and change it to <any_character><space><version> rpmlint-0.81-1.fc8.noarch
(In reply to comment #0) > It works fine for everyone, the changelogs are clear, and users happy. I personally disagree strongly. I think it's hard to read and the fancy symbology doesn't tell me anything, in fact I'm wasting time trying to decipher its meaning compared to just reading change log entries marked with "*" and "-" bullets like the rest of the world does them. If you want to communicate more about particular entries, just write the notes out in plain English (eg. "- 20070415-1 (approach with care)"). In addition to making it harder to read for humans, fancy formatting may also require tweaking tools to adjust to it (such as witnessed by this bug report), that's the second waste of time IMO. If there's a patch to get rpmlint do what you want, I'll look into it, but I don't feel like wasting my time to adapt it to practices that I personally think are basically a disservice to users -> WONTFIX. Feel free to reopen when/if there's a patch available.