A small fraction of the pkg-perl packages had dummy changelog entries: libfoo-perl (xx.yy) UNRELEASED; urgency=low * NOT RELEASED YET -- A. Maintainer <foo@debian.org> Sat, 11 Aug 2007 23:13:59 -0400 I've removed these. The idea behind this sort of dummy entry seems to be to avoid someone accidentially listing changes in the previous, released changelog entry. These are currently added by svn-buildpackage --svn-tag, if run without --svn-noautodch. Or perhaps by some people manually. But they are not needed with the current version of dch, which can automatically add a new UNRELEASED entry for you, if one doesn't already exist. To enable that, just do: echo "DEBCHANGE_RELEASE_HEURISTIC=changelog" >> ~/.devscripts Besides being unnecessary, the dummy entries caused some problems: * Several packages were accidentially released with changelogs that claimed they were "NOT RELEASED YET". Confusing! * Grepping for UNRELEASED packages is useful to see packages that need work, or a trivial upload. But this is too hard when half the hits are false positives with dummy changelog entries. * Only a small fraction of packages had the dummy changelog entries, so anyone who relied on them would eventually encounter a package that didn't have one, and presumably mess up. By the way, the current "UNRELEASED" thing in changelogs isn't perfect since it only says when a package is not yet released, and doesn't tell why. Maybe the changes arn't complete yet, or need testing. Or maybe it's just not been uploaded yet, and is ready to go. My understanding is that in the perl group, if a package is ready for release, one can s/UNRELEASED/unstable/, and the package will then show up as needing uploading in <http://pkg-perl.alioth.debian.org/qa/versions.html>. I think this is a very nice approach, the only problem with it being that it doesn't work for other teams that don't have such a nice page! :-) I've been trying to figure out for a while a nice way to encode this needs-upload state in the changelog, in a way that can be grepped for like UNRELEASED can, but I haven't thought up an approach that I like yet.. -- see shy jo
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