Bug#621840: lintian: please warning when urgency in changes does not match the changelog

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Niels Thykier <niels@thykier.net> writes:

> Looking at two uploads today ([1], [2]) I noticed that the urgency of
> the newest entry of the changelog was low, but the changes had urgency
> high or critical.  The high/critical urgency was most likely inherited
> from earlier entries.

> If the package is truly includes uploads of high/critical nature that
> has not been included in an upload to Debian before, I think it would
> be a good idea ask the maintainer to bump the urgency of the first
> upload to Debian as well.
>   I hope this can avoid cases where people include earlier changelog
> entries (intentionally or by mistake), which causes the urgency to be
> inflated by earlier entries.

So you would advocate both that and removing the functionality in
dpkg-genchanges where it uses the urgency of the highest changelog entry
included?

I actually prefer the current behavior, even though we occasionally get
problems like those two entries.  (I think they should be less common now
that the current dpkg-genchanges, IIRC, no longer includes the entire
changelog entry if you use a version that doesn't exist, but instead
compares the version and only includes newer versions, which was probably
what was intended.)  It feels like it more accurately represents the
urgency of each separate change.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>