Dear Maintainer,

I'm trying to figure out whether there are any pending changes upstream
to solve a bug that may be fixed upstream.

It seems that upstream's elpa or melpa provide versions of the packages,
and there, versioning is like 20161224. However there's nothing in
/usr/share/doc/org-mode/ that indicates a corresponding date.

Having some kind of upstream changelog comparable to upstream's could
help also.

Thanks in advance.

Best regards,

For this, you can hit something like
http://orgmode.org/cgit.cgi/org-mode.git/tag/?id=release_9.0.2 and get
the date the tag was pushed. This is not an information that's directly
accessible from within the upstream tarball, so I don't think I can
easily include it in the Debian package.

I agree, but that's also not something available inside the
tarball. Would you like to open an upstream bug asking them to package
the release notes, and then we can also have it in Debian ?

Cheers,

Olivier Berger <olivier.berger@telecom-sudparis.eu> writes:

Do you know how to use git?  If so, I could make this easier to set up
for org-mode.  The worst-case scenario interface would be:

  $ debcheckout org-mode && cd org-mode
  $ # The new command to fetch the upstream remote using upstream/metadata
  $ git log upstreamvcs/main
  [ Press "/" key, type "tag" <Enter/Return>, repeat until you find the
  version we use in Debian ]
  [  Press the up arrow to read commit messages in chronological order. ]

I would have to look into if git-build-package's upstream tag
associating support will still work properly with dfsg-cleaned source
--using this tag association feature would make comparing their source
to our source easier.

"A few weeks ago GNU-devel ELPA and NonGNU-devel ELPA also switched to
the RELEASE.0.DATE.COUNT format", and MELPA is finally going to move to
this git-describe style too (https://emacsair.me/2026/07/03/melpa-channels/).
This type of version number is something we already use in Debian so
that apt can correctly determine the latest version.

I'll reply to this point in a moment, because I want to CC upstream
about it.

Best,
Nicholas

Olivier Berger <olivier.berger@telecom-sudparis.eu> writes:

Do you know how to use git?  If so, I could make this easier to set up
for org-mode.  The worst-case scenario interface would be:

  $ debcheckout org-mode && cd org-mode
  $ # The new command to fetch the upstream remote using upstream/metadata
  $ git log upstreamvcs/main
  [ Press "/" key, type "tag" <Enter/Return>, repeat until you find the
  version we use in Debian ]
  [  Press the up arrow to read commit messages in chronological order. ]

I would have to look into if git-build-package's upstream tag
associating support will still work properly with dfsg-cleaned source
--using this tag association feature would make comparing their source
to our source easier.

"A few weeks ago GNU-devel ELPA and NonGNU-devel ELPA also switched to
the RELEASE.0.DATE.COUNT format", and MELPA is finally going to move to
this git-describe style too (https://emacsair.me/2026/07/03/melpa-channels/).
This type of version number is something we already use in Debian so
that apt can correctly determine the latest version.

I'll reply to this point in a moment, because I want to CC upstream
about it.

Best,
Nicholas

Dear org-mode maintainers,

Sébastien Delafond <seb@debian.org> writes:

I'm not sure if Olivier ever contacted you about providing a changelog
in the release tarball (or in the docs in git), but I wanted to write to
you to say that I would also appreciate this, and I'd like to include
them in the Debian package.  Olivier's wish appears to be to make it
easier to determine whether switching from the Debian-provided package
to the direct use of your ELPA package would resolve one or more bugs.

Thank you for your consideration, and I'd appreciate it if you would
keep 850611@bugs.debian.org in either the recipients or the CC list.

Regards,
Nicholas

Nicholas D Steeves <sten@debian.org> writes:

Do you mean etc/ORG-NEWS? It should be included in the ELPA tarball.

tldr, resolved.

Hi Ihor,

Ihor Radchenko <yantar92@posteo.net> writes:

Aha!  Sorry, I forgot I started to ship this back in 2024, and was
triaging a bug that predated that event.  We ship it as

    /usr/share/doc/elpa-org/changelog.gz

and of course it opens correctly in org-mode because of the file-local
variable.  Thanks for setting that, by the way.

Sorry for the noise and thanks for the quick reply.
Best,
Nicholas