Why <changelog>?

I've been maintaining a few PEAR packages for a while now (long enough for each package to have accumulated a number of releases). One of the most tedious (and, in my opinion, unnecessary) steps in releasing a new version of a PEAR package is updating the <changelog> block to contain the previous release's details. I'm now curious: Why must package maintainers track the set of changes in the package.xml file? It seems like an data-based operation that _should_ be handled by the scripts and database on pear.php.net (e.g. when a new release is submitted, the changelog is updated). Can someone shed some light on why this isn't the way things are currently done? -- Jon Parise (jon@php.net) :: The PHP Project (http://www.php.net/)