[Pkg-bazaar-maint] Building "unfinalized" packages

[James Westby]

On (08/07/07 11:54), Michael Olson wrote:
> > I'm not sure about eroding changelog.py's strictness. We have
> > removed errors on trailing unrecognised blocks, but this is
> > accepting a block without all the information.
> >
> > I'm not against it, but I would like to know why
> > debian-changelog-mode does this, can't it just fill the information
> > in?
> 
> This isn't a quirk of debian-changelog-mode; it's just a matter of taste
> for changes that one is working on collaboratively with others.
> 
> I am not actually trying to build a package with an unfinalized entry.
> What I am trying to do is tell bzr-buildpackage to "export" the debian/
> directory and insert it into a fresh unpack of the .orig.gz tarball,
> without building it.  This is useful for making sure that patches apply
> correctly, and testing select parts of the debian/rules file.
> 
> The reason for my proposed change is that even export without build
> fails with the current changelog.py code.  With the change, an
> unfinalized block would have an author and date of None, which ought to
> be sanity-checked later on in the code anyway.
> 

This format of changelog does not conform to that laid out in Debian
policy. However policy does allow for different changelog formats,
but no others are currently handled by changelog.py.

I am not against solving your problem, but I'm not sure about the
proposed fix. It is changing a library to parse a changelog format
and not provide all of the information that is expected, and cannot
be written out again.

This might not be too bad, but it is a library, so I am wary to start
making these changes. It seems to break my expectation of what the
library would do. I can see 3 solutions:

  1) Apply the patch, and document that the changelog entry might
     not be complete after parsing.

  2) Add a conditional way to enable this, either with a keyword
     option or different method.

  3) Make a change in builddeb to work around the issue somehow.

Note that trying to use one of these with dpkg gives

  parsechangelog/debian: error: badly formatted trailer line, at file
  debian/changelog line 5

Thanks,

James

-- 
  James Westby   --    GPG Key ID: B577FE13    --     http://jameswestby.net/
  seccure key - (3+)k7|M*edCX/.A:n*N!>|&7U.L#9E)Tu)T0>AM - secp256r1/nistp256