Time for a .changes file format 2.0?
Hi!
Samuel Thibault recently reported in #818618 that the Binary field in
the .changes files does not get filtered to only include the binary
packages that are being uploaded, as documented in the ancient
doc/programming.sgml in dpkg 1.3.3 [P], current debian-policy and
now in the dpkg deb-changes(5) [C] man page (in git master).
[P] <https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/dpkg/dpkg.git/tree/doc/programmer.sgml?id=f50dc4ae0a76894d2446bbc59144ed72beb380ff#n1133>
[C] <https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/dpkg/dpkg.git/tree/man/deb-changes.5>
But this is not really a new behavior, this has behaved like that
since dpkg-genchanges' inception. So either the documentation needs
fixing or we should make dpkg-genchanges behave as documented.
The latter has the immediate problem that it breaks long backwards
compatibility pretty severely. And I think current users such as
DAK (ftp-masters CCed) and probably others might rely on that field
containing all possibly generated binary packages(?), although the
Binary field in the .dsc file already contains that information. This
gets worse with source-only uploads as that might break quite many
expectations, as the field would be missing.
So I'd propose the conservative way out to just fix the docs to match
reality with format 1.8. And then use the opportunity to revamp the
.changes format and draft a new version 2.0, and include the change
there. As a starting point I've listed several of the current issues
I see in the following very early draft:
<https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Dpkg/Spec/ChangesFormat2.0>
Thanks,
Guillem
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