[gentoo-alt] [PREFIX] All ChangeLogs are generated now

[Fabian Groffen]

All,

This message is probably more interesting for developers, than it is for
users, but since users directly "benefit" from this change, it should be
of interest to most.

Since yesterday, all of the ChangeLog files in the prefix rsync tree are
generated from the CVS and SVN commit messages.  This means the checked
in ChangeLog files are discarded and overwritten by the generated
versions when rsync0 assembles the rsync tree.

Generated ChangeLog files are easy to spot in their $Header line, it
contains "generated/ChangeLog", with the version of the generation
script, the time of generation, and the name of the script that
generated it.

Because all ChangeLogs change because of the generation, all Manifests
are re-generated as well.  During this regeneration, they are signed
with the Gentoo Prefix Portage Snapshot Signing Key (C6317B3C), which
(as its name suggests) is also used for signing the portage tree
snapshots.
This means that as side-effect of generation of the ChangeLog files, the
full tree is now signed, e.g. you can verify that the copy of the ebuild
you have is the same as the one rsync0 had when creating the rsync tree.
(And it doesn't mean much more than that.)

Obvious advantage of ChangeLog generation for Prefix users is that
packages which still live in our SVN Prefix "overlay", now have
meaningful ChangeLogs with respect to commits made in the SVN tree,
which often are fixes.  See for example the Python ChangeLog[1].

ChangeLog generation should not change anything regarding ebuilds.  If
you see weird digest or manifest failures, please file a bug.


[1] http://rsync1.prefix.freens.org/dev-lang/python/ChangeLog

-- 
Fabian Groffen
Gentoo on a different level