Re: Ubuntu-to-Debian packaging

[Colin Watson <cjwatson@ubuntu.com>]

On Wed, Dec 05, 2007 at 01:42:56PM +0100, Cesare Tirabassi wrote:
> On Wednesday 05 December 2007 04:27:28 C.J. Adams-Collier wrote:
> > Do you feel that it is appropriate to copy someone else's changelog
> > entry verbatim without giving credit to the original author?
> 
> I guess you refer to mono-addins, for which I prepared an SRU in Ubuntu, using 
> the patches provided by Mirco?
> Yes, I partly used his changelog because, quite frankly, what was the point of 
> changing it? Its the author's changelog and for him it reflected best the 
> content of the change, beside it ties with the history of the package. For 
> those not familiar with our SRU, we apply the changes in the development 
> version (in this case from the new Debian version) to solve a problem in our 
> stable release. If you look at the bug report this should be clearer to you:
> 
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mono-addins/+bug/149485
> 
> In summary, I made the (evidently wrong) assumption that it was clear that 
> this was a backport of an issue already fixed in Debian.
> So, in retrospect, yes, it would have been clearer to quote the source in the 
> changelog, something that I won't forget in the future.

I've now adjusted the Ubuntu stable release updates documentation to
explicitly say:

  As with any upload, the changelog entry must properly credit the
  author of the change, if it was not originally made by you.

I hope this will avoid such mistakes in the future.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson@ubuntu.com]