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Bug#353447: Weird suggestion on closing bugs fixed in NMU



Package: developers-reference
Severity: normal

To my big surprise, I read in section 6.3.2:

| It is an old tradition to acknowledge bugs fixed in non-maintainer
| uploads in the first changelog entry of the proper maintainer upload,
| for instance, in a changelog entry like this:
| 
|            * Maintainer upload, closes: #42345, #44484, #42444.
| 
| This will close the NMU bugs tagged "fixed" when the package makes it
| into the archive. The bug for the fact that an NMU was done can be
| closed the same way. Of course, it's also perfectly acceptable to close
| NMU-fixed bugs by other means; see Responding to bugs, Section 5.8.2. 

Which is IMHO wrong advice: The bug submitter will then get this
statement as a bug closing mail, while the bug wasn't closed by this
upload! I think this practice should rather be strongly discouraged,
rather than encouraged.

The best practice IMHO is to use dpkg-buildpackage -v<last maintainer
upload> on the maintainer upload, thereby including the changelogs bits
for the NMU's, and not mention any bugs that were not solely "I NMU'd,
here's a patch" type of bugs. In general, it should IMHO be
emphasised that a Closes: statement in a changelog should at all
times refer to something that actually really is closing/fixing the
bug in question, rather than procedural stuff etc.

With dpkg-buildpackage -v, the submitter of a bug will get as
explanation the changelog bit that actually made his bug get resolved.

Thanks,
--Jeroen

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 3.1
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.8-2-k7
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)

-- 
Jeroen van Wolffelaar
jeroen@wolffelaar.nl
http://jeroen.A-Eskwadraat.nl



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