Re: how to manage d/changelog for updated but not yet sponsored package

[Gergely Nagy <algernon@balabit.hu>]

Nicolas Dandrimont <nicolas.dandrimont@crans.org> writes:

> Le 13/02/2012 à 13:14, Gergely Nagy <algernon@balabit.hu> écrivit :
>>
>> ${VERSION}-${N}~mentors${X} for mentors, ${VERSION}-${N} for Debian
>> proper. A little more work on both sides, but we get the best of both
>> worlds with as little of the worst as possible.
>
> Hi,
>
> This scheme is something I was thinking about doing automatically for
> mentors (i.e. upload ${VERSION}-${N}, but get back ${VERSION}-${N}~mentors${X}).
>
> This would avoid the current clobbering of files from one upload to the
> other, and would allow us to present diffs between subsequent uploads of
> the packages.

I don't think that's a good idea. My wish with the ~mentors${X} would be
that it's used intentionally, when the maintainer changes something, and
uploads a new version, that gets a new changelog entry.

You can't automate this reliably.

To illustrate, here's a changelog snippet meant for mentors:

my-little-pony (1.0-1~mentors2) unstable; urgency=low

  * Use debhelper (>= 9) to gain hardened build flags for free.

 -- Pony Herder <stablemaster@example.org>  Tue, 07 Feb 2012 10:00:00 +0100

my-little-pony (1.0-1~mentors1) unstable; urgency=low

  * Initial upload (Closes: #PONIES)

 -- Pony Herder <stablemaster@example.org>  Mon, 06 Feb 2012 14:00:00 +0100

This makes it clear what changed between ~mentors1 and ~mentors2. But
~mentors2 is fairly pointless when uploading to Debian, so this would
get flattened into:

my-little-pony (1.0-1) unstable; urgency=low

  * Initial upload (Closes: #PONIES)

 -- Pony Herder <stablemaster@example.org>  Tue, 07 Feb 2012 10:00:00 +0100

If you'd automatically turn 1.0-1 into 1.0-1~mentors${X}, you'd have to
do some changelog diffing and altering. That's not going to work.

Plus, it would also prevent the sponsors from building & uploading the
maintainer prepared package without modifications. As a sponsor, I don't
want to modify packages I upload, I will review them, suggest or request
modifications, and let the maintainer do it, update my sources, and work
from there. Automatically munging the version would make this
impossible, or at least very inconvenient.

-- 
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