lintian versus Closes in changelog headers

[Ben Pfaff <blp@cs.stanford.edu>]

For a brief period of time, the way to close a bug on package
upload was to add a "closes" header to the changelog entry, e.g.:

    nqc (2.0.2-2) unstable; closes=50669; urgency=low

      * New upstream documentation.  Fixes Bug#50669.  Thanks to Jim Studt
        <jim@federated.com> for reporting this.

     -- Ben Pfaff <blp@gnu.org>  Sat, 20 Nov 1999 01:11:32 -0500

Modern lintian complains about this, with
syntax-error-in-debian-changelog "unknown key-value key Closes -
copying to XS-Closes".  I'm not eager to "change history" by
deleting the closes keyword or by changing the entry to use the
newer "Closes: #xyz" syntax, although I certainly could do so.
Could lintian be changed to accept this keyword?  Perhaps it
could just accept it for changelog entries before some date.
-- 
Ben Pfaff 
email: blp@cs.stanford.edu
web: http://benpfaff.org