Re: [dmidecode] Usefulness of CHANGELOG

[Erwan Velu]

Sounds reasonable for me. That kind of CHANGELOG is enough for getting
what's new, if some wants more details, git is the perfect tool.

2017-06-06 11:21 GMT+02:00 Jean Delvare <address@hidden>:

> Hi all,
>
> It seems to me that the CHANGELOG file as it exists today is
> essentially redundant with git log. It's not really user friendly, and
> duplicates the work on the committer side.
>
> I would like to propose to delete that file, and replace it with a more
> structured NEWS file, listing only the most relevant changes in each
> version. The contents would be pretty much the same as the release
> announcements I'm posting on this list. I have prepared an initial
> version covering most past releases:
>
> Version 3.1 (Tue May 23 2017)
>   - Support for SMBIOS 3.1.0 and 3.1.1. This includes new chassis types,
> new
>     processor family names, new processor family upgrade names, and new
> slot
>     types, as well as support of larger BIOS ROM sizes and cache sizes,
> and a
>     new structure type (43, TPM Device.)
>   - A new command line option to query OEM strings.
>   - All error messages are now printed on stderr (#47274, #48158.)
>   - Several bug fixes related to 64-bit entry points (#50037 and more.)
>   - Important bug fixes:
>     #46176 (Unexpected end of file error)
>     #46066 (Crash with SIGBUS)
>   - Various minor fixes, improvements and cleanups.
>
> Version 3.0 (Thu Sep 03 2015)
>   - Support for SMBIOS 3.0. This includes new chassis types, new
>     processor family names, new processor family upgrade names, new slot
>     types, and new memory device types.
>   - Support for the new 64-bit entry point (_SM3_) defined in SMBIOS 3.0.
>   - Support for the new kernel interface (as of Linux v4.2) as an
>     alternative to relying /dev/mem to access the entry point and DMI
>     table.
>   - Decoding of Acer-specific DMI type 170.
>   - Decoding of HP-specific DMI types 212, 219 and 233.
>   - Various minor fixes and output format cleanups.
>
> Version 2.12 (Wed Apr 17 2013)
>   - Support of the SMBIOS 2.8.0 specification.
>
> Version 2.11 (Wed Jan 19 2011)
>   - Support of the SMBIOS 2.7.0 specification:
>     - UEFI support
>     - Virtual machine flags in BIOS characteristics
>     - Limited support for the Management Controller Host Interface
>   - Various fixes that address stability.
>
> Version 2.10 (Sun Nov 23 2008)
>   - Support for Solaris (x86 only, of course).
>   - Possibility to dump the SMBIOS/DMI table to a small binary file
>     (option --dump-bin).
>   - Possibility to read the SMBIOS/DMI table from such binary files
>     (option --from-dump).
>   - Support for SMBIOS 2.6. This includes new chassis types, new
>     processor family names, new processor family upgrade names, bus
>     address for system slots, and a new entry type for on-board devices,
>     amongst many other minor changes.
>   - Support for DMI entry type 31 (Boot integrity services).
>   - Many processor family names taken from the CIM Schema document.
>   - (vpddecode) No longer ask users to report broken records.
>   - (vpddecode) Fix --quiet option.
>
> Version 2.9 (Mon Feb 26 2007)
>   - Support of the SMBIOS 2.5 specification. It adds many enumerated
>     values for recent hardware, as well as CPU core and thread count
>     reporting.
>   - Decoding of 3 HP-specific entries. More vendor-specific entries can
>     be supported later if vendors contribute code or documentation.
>   - Run-time detection of EFI, so that a single binary can support
>     Intel-based Macintosh machines and regular x86 machines.
>   - Better IA-64 support.
>   - Fixes to the decoding of individual fields, including the CPU
>     signature of recent CPU models.
>   - (biosdecode) Support of the FJKEYINF entry point type (for Fujitsu
> laptops).
>   - (vpddecode) The product name look-up table was dropped. It was
> unreliable
>     and a burden to maintain.
>   - biosdecode, ownership and vpddecode are no longer built on IA-64.
>
> Version 2.8 (Sat Feb 04 2006)
>   - Option --string has four additional keywords available:
>     system-uuid, chassis-type, processor-family and processor-frequency.
>     These needed additional work because, technically speaking, they are
>     not DMI strings.
>   - IPMI interface type SSIF was added. This is a new interface type
>     defined by IPMI 2.0.
>   - (vpddecode) New --string option, much similar in spirit to
>     dmidecode's. Available keywords are bios-build-id, box-serial-number,
>     motherboard-serial-number, machine-type-model and bios-release-date.
>   - (vpddecode) 9 product names were added to the lookup table.
>   -  A few bug fixes, cleanups and minor improvements all around the place.
>
> Version 2.7 (Thu Aug 04 2005)
>   - New command line interface. For example, it is now possible to limit
>     the output of dmidecode to a given DMI type, or to extract a single
>     string from the DMI table. The documentation has been updated
>     accordingly.
>   - The default output of dmidecode was slightly modified to be more
>     easily readable by humans. This might break tools parsing its output.
>     Such tools may benefit from the new command line interface, although
>     this interface shouldn't be considered stable until version 2.8.
>   - (vpddecode) New command line interface.
>   - (vpddecode) 6 product names were added.
>
> Version 2.6 (Mon Feb 28 2005)
>   - Fixes a 2 GB memory limit regression.
>   - Basic command-line handling.
>   - BeOS and Cygwin support.
>
> Version 2.5 (Thu Nov 11 2004)
>   - Code cleanups.
>   - Compatibility fixes.
>   - Documentation updates.
>
> Version 2.4 (Fri Mar 19 2004)
>   - Manual pages added.
>   - (vpddecode) Many improvements.
>   - A few fixes and minor improvements.
>
> Version 2.3 (Sun Oct 19 2003)
>   - Support of x86_64 systems.
>   - Support of systems with 2 GB and more memory.
>   - Loads of bug fixes and corrections.
>   - New tool "vpddecode" added.
>
> Version 2.2 (Fri Aug 08 2003)
>   - Support of IA-64 systems.
>   - Support of IBM and Fujitsu-Siemens laptops.
>   - Many minor bug fixes.
>   - New tool "ownership" added.
>
> Version 2.1 (Tue Jun 10 2003)
>   - Support of the SMBIOS 2.3.4 specification.
>   - Better support of IPMI.
>   - Minor bugs fixed.
>   - Documentation added.
>
> The size of this new file is about 10% of the size of the CHANGELOG
> file.
>
> Opinions?
>
> Thanks,
> --
> Jean Delvare
> SUSE L3 Support
>
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