Hi Ben! Thanks for the bug report. * Ben Wiederhake <BenWiederhake.GitHub@gmx.de>, 2015-10-13, 01:29:
Given a debian/changelog that ends with, for example: """ -- Hugues Morisset <morisset.hugues@gmail.com> Fri, 02 Oct 2015 14:13:47 +0100 """ And given a debian/control that contains, among others: """ Maintainer: Hugues Morisset <morisset.hugues@gmail.com> """Then lintian complains (correctly!) about the current version being a NMU, i.e., changelog-should-mention-nmu and source-nmu-has-incorrect-version-number.For a Debian newbie, this is very confusing.
Agreed. Experienced maintainers are used to the fact that these tags often mean something else that their name suggests, but this is really unfriendly to newcomers. We should fix it.
To make it easier to resolve issues like this, I would like to "wish" for an *additional* warning message like this:"""The most recent changelog entry is from " Hugues Morisset <morisset.hugues@gmail.com>". The control file lists "Hugues Morisset <morisset.hugues@gmail.com>" as a maintainer. These count as different people only due to differing whitespace, even though the address is identical. If this dissociation is unintended, please correct the whitespace issue in the changelog."""
We should probably just add a new tag about extra whitespace around name in the changelog trailer.
We should also normalize whitespace when comparing names, since it's obviously not significant.
As indicated in the fictive warning message, I would suggest checking the "raw" email address of the changelog against the "raw" email address of each maintainer and uploader. If the address matches but the name doesn't, then the packager most definitely did not intend this.
Yes, I think it would make sense to only compare e-mail addresses for NMU detection. We should still complain when there's real name mismatch, because that's likely a mistake, but that could be a separate tag.
-- Jakub Wilk