some distributions have GNU style files, thus making the Changes link less than useful

[wchristian]

As an example: https://metacpan.org/module/Locale::TextDomain

It contains in the changelog, a summary of the git commits. The actual changelog however is in the NEWS and ReleaseNotes files. If the detector for the changes file would prioritize these first, that would be helpful.

[oalders]

I think before we did this we'd have to be sure there aren't other modules with both of these files where NEWS/ReleaseNotes should not be prioritized. ie where Changes is actual useful.

[tobyink]

FWIW, my HTML-HTML5-Parser and Type-Tiny releases each include both Changes and NEWS, and I consider Changes to be actually useful.

[rwstauner]

Yeah, I think it's one of those things where the best we can do is go with the overwhelming convention,
which means there are going to be some dists that don't work.

We could:

• Check if there is more than one candidate
• Extract the dist
• Read the text of each candidate and if it looks like the output of git log skip to the next one
• Use the first result of files that weren't filtered out

But I think that's considerably excessive and it will realistically just leave us at the same place (a number of dists that still don't work).
So we won't be doing that.

I suppose a more realistic option would be to check for a META paramter, like x_changelog (or x_user_changelog or x_useful_changelog or something, and just respect that.
Of course that requires dists to ship that in their META files, so won't help with old dists or dists that don't like conventions.

So it sounds like we're back where we started. :-)

[ranguard]

Moved to wish list: https://github.com/CPAN-API/cpan-api/wiki/Wishlist

[karenetheridge]

I'd rather just beat up the misbehaving authors in a back alley. Who's with me?