Re: Ubuntu-to-Debian packaging

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author of the change, if it was not originally made by you.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]

Thank you Colin.

I feel that it would be a prudent move for the debian documentation to be adjusted to reflect the same.

Cheers,

C.J.