#1040529 stable-{security,updates} miss Changelogs field in Release file

#1040529#5
Date:
2023-07-04 07:51:47 UTC
From:
To:
Dear Maintainer,

with the recent change of long changelogs being truncated automatically, and
the full version of such truncated changelogs always being fetched by
`apt[-get] changelog`, there is no way anymore to use `apt changelog` to just
display "the changelog", if either

- the repository metadata doesn't contain a `Changelogs` reference (many 3rd
  party repositories, but also stable-security and stable-updates!)
- the "online" changelog does not exist (yet)

this is the case for security updates as well, e.g. today's ghostscript update
for bookworm (10.0.0-dfsg11+deb12u1):
- before the update, it fails because the changelog for that version is not
  found on metadata.ftp-masters.debian.org (ghostscript is also shipped by the
  "main" repository that has metadata.f-m.d.o as Changelogs host)
- after the update, it still fails for the same reason, even though at least
  the truncated changelog is available by virtue of the package being
  installed..

it would be nice if we could get back the old behaviour of "if fetching fails,
display local changelog contents" (possibly with a hint/warning about that fact).

it also seems to me like it is possible to confuse apt about where to fetch
changelogs from, as per the above example (security upgrade fetches changelog
from regular repo) - but since that requires control of the Release file, it's
probably not much of an issue in practice.

#1040529#10
Date:
2023-07-07 10:52:13 UTC
From:
To:
control: clone -1 -2
Control: reassign -2 ftp.debian.org
Control: retitle -2 stable-{security,updates} miss Changelogs field in Release file

Cloning the bug to ftp.debian.org accordingly

We never had that behavior, it would be nice and it would have been my
preferred approach, but it needs a lot of work to add fallback to the
downloading item, we ran out of time for the release for this or the
other more flexible approach with options to control the behaviour.

That is not possible, no. APT is fetching the changelogs as instructed
by the repository metadata, and the defaults, and Origin: Debian has

Acquire::Changelogs::URI::Origin::Debian
"https://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs/@CHANGEPATH@_changelog";

I would expect changelogs for -updates and -security to pop up there,
and I do consider it a bug in dak or whatever if a package is published
without a corresponding changelog in place tbh.