[R-pkg-team] Bug#932179: dh-r: dh-update-R does not support debhelper-compat

[Andreas Tille]

Package: dh-r
Version: 20190411
Severity: normal


Hi,

in r-cran-irkernel in commit 170e3cbd Gordon Ball has removed
debian/compat and replaced debhelper by

   debhelper-compat (= 12)

While I'm not sure whether this is a good idea regarding backports it
breaks the routine-update script which always calls dh-update-R.  In
this script in line 117[1] debian/compat is parsed to obtain debhelper
version - which fails since that file does not exist any more if
debhelper-compat is used.  Since there is not even proper error handling
in line 122 an invalid string is created.

For the moment I can cope with the r-cran-irkernel package update by
simply reverting the change and re-introduce debian/compat.  But in
the long term dh-update-R should be able to cope with valid control
file syntax.

Kind regards

     Andreas.

[1] https://salsa.debian.org/r-pkg-team/dh-r/blob/master/scripts/dh-update-R#L117


-- System Information:
Debian Release: 10.0
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (501, 'testing'), (50, 'buildd-unstable'), (50, 'unstable'), (5, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 4.19.0-5-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=de_DE.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=de_DE.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled

Versions of packages dh-r depends on:
ii  dctrl-tools         2.24-3
ii  debhelper           12.1.1
ii  libfile-which-perl  1.23-1
ii  libswitch-perl      2.17-2
ii  r-base-dev          3.5.2-1

Versions of packages dh-r recommends:
ii  devscripts  2.19.5

dh-r suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information