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Re: BTS and unreleased changelog entries



On Mon, Oct 16, 2017 at 11:54:20AM +1100, Ben Finney wrote:
> Ross Vandegrift <ross@kallisti.us> writes:
> > Good question. I guess I think of a changelog as history - so changes
> > I made on 1.15 go with 1.15 whether it was released or not.
>
> Thanks for explaining your perspective.
>
> That perspective, I think, does not match the stated purpose for the
> Debian package changelog: to inform *recipients* of the package about
> changes between *releases* of that package.
>
> So, a further question: Why did “changes made on 1.15” not simply
> continue accumulating changes?  You say it was not released; that
> should mean the changelog entry is not closed, because a changelog
> entry documents a *release* of the Debian package.

The entry for 1.15 stopped accumulating changes when upstream released 1.16
before I finished.  I continued work on the new release, and began a new entry.
At that time I didn't know this would cause issues.

I vaguely remember looking at other packages for guidance.  I probably found
plenty of examples: grepping for unreleased versions in
/usr/share/doc/*/changelog.Debian.gz find a few hundred hits on my laptop.

> > But if I think of the changelog as telling others about changes in a
> > release, then it makes sense to squash them.
>
> Yes, that's the purpose specified for the Debian package changelog.

Cool, I'm glad to know this now.  But where is it specified?  A quick re-read
of the changelog sections of the policy manual, developer's reference, and
maintainer's guide didn't turn anything up.  Did I miss it?

I'm not trying to argue about the policy.  I just want to make sure that new
people can learn this from the documentation and maybe avoid some headaches.

> > Either way, I try to avoid it now. So it's really just dealing with
> > the previous entries.
>
> For already-released versions you will need to deal with closing those
> bugs manually anyway.

Others in this thread have said that an upload with dpkg-genchanges -v will
trigger the bugs to be closed.  Are you saying that's incorrect?

Thanks,
Ross


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