Re: Handling of changelogs and bin-nmus

[Raphael Hertzog <hertzog@debian.org>]

Hi,

On Tue, 12 Jun 2012, Guillem Jover wrote:
> > This allows us to get rid of the special-casing of bin-nmu in dpkg where
> > we only support one extension (+bX).
> >
> > We have many other cases where it would be helpful to be able to do such
> > binary-only rebuild in different environments and where it might be
> > interesting to share the same source package.
> 
> If the main purpose of this is to generalize the binNMU versioning
> syntax then instead of entangling these different issues I think it's
> way better to mark the changelog entry as such, so that there's actual
> generic metadata that can be used by the tools, that does not need to
> change the debian/changelog interface, neither modify other possible
> parsers to look into different files, etc.

OK, that looks a reasonable approach for this need. But then it doesn't
help with the short term problem of bin-nmus and changelogs.

We don't have many solutions, and none is perfect. They should all be
considered as temporary measures until we have implemented storage of
changelog in control.tar.gz:

1/ we modify dpkg to ignore differences on /usr/share/doc/*/changelog.*gz
for multi-arch: same packages

2/ we modify dh_installchangelogs to strip the entries marked
   "binary-only" for packages which are multi-arch same
  (this doesn't help packages that are not using debhelper
   but it's probably not a big deal)

> I've just cooked code to support this in dpkg, an example entry could
> look like this (the binary-only key could be named something else):

Can you push your preliminary code to your personal repo? I'd be
interested to complete the work if you don't have the time.

Cheers,
-- 
Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer

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