[Pkg-bazaar-maint] Bug#619294: bzr-builddeb: Don't disallow unknown distributions

[Michael Alan Dorman]

Package: bzr-builddeb
Version: 2.7.2
Severity: normal


Changes in version 2.7 have caused bzr-builddeb to start confirming
the distribution named in the changelog matches a Debian or Ubuntu
distribution that it knows about.

In doing so, you have rendered bzr-builddeb useless to me, and perhaps
others.

I maintain a private repository using reprepro for branches of
packages I have tweaked or that are inapplicable to a wider audience,
and to make sure that I don't accidentally upload one to a public
repository, I have taken to setting the distribution in the changelog
to 'private'.

Unfortunately, with the update to version 2.7.2, I can no longer build
such packages with bzr-builddeb, because I now get:

 Building branch from revision adorman at ironicdesign.com-20110322143630-ubwg87cqyrz9zo9q
 bzr: ERROR: Unknown distribution: private.

This seems unnecessarily restrictive, and looking at the code, I can't
understand why this error exists---it would seem to be a heuristic
meant to be convenient to Ubuntu users, but it hardly seems like a
requirement.

I would recommend that this be turned into a warning, at most, or at
least give a user a way to not have it be a fatal error

Prior versions had no problem with any of this, and for the moment I
have downgraded bzr-builddeb to 2.4 to avoid this issue.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: wheezy/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (990, 'testing'), (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.38-1-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages bzr-builddeb depends on:
ii  bzr                     2.3.0-6          easy to use distributed version co
ii  devscripts              2.10.71          scripts to make the life of a Debi
ii  dpkg-dev                1.15.8.10        Debian package development tools
ii  fakeroot                1.14.5-1         Gives a fake root environment
ii  patchutils              0.3.2-1          Utilities to work with patches
ii  pristine-tar            1.12             regenerate pristine tarballs
ii  python                  2.6.6-3+squeeze6 interactive high-level object-orie
ii  python-apt              0.7.100.1        Python interface to libapt-pkg
ii  python-debian           0.1.18           Python modules to work with Debian
ii  python2.5               2.5.5-11         An interactive high-level object-o
ii  python2.6               2.6.6-8+b1       An interactive high-level object-o

Versions of packages bzr-builddeb recommends:
pn  python-launchpadlib           <none>     (no description available)

Versions of packages bzr-builddeb suggests:
pn  bzr-svn                       <none>     (no description available)

-- no debconf information