Re: Proposal to update NMU section 5.11.1

["Bernhard R. Link" <brlink@debian.org>]

* Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org> [120426 02:08]:
> Thanks for the information, I thought it was obsoleted when the closing of bugs
> became versionned.

Before closing become versioned, the situation was more complex:

 Before, a upload of a .changes would behave differently depending
 whether it was a NMU or not. If it was a MU then there were mails
 to NNNN-done@bugs.debian.org sent (just as they are now) but if it
 was a NMU, then this was not done. Instead those bugs got the tag
 "fixed".
 Thus if you acknowledged an NMU with the following MU, you had
 again close all the bugs in the new changelog of the package (so they
 would now be properly closed).
 This was necessary to avoid bugs being closed in a NMU but that change
 being silently reverted by the maintainer uploading a new version
 ignoring the NMU.

 For example that looked like
| e2fsprogs (1.38-2) unstable; urgency=low
|
|   * Previous NMU acknowledged (Closes: #317862, #320389)
| [...]

Since bug-closing is versioned that is no longer necessary.
bugs.debian.org keeps the information about what version a bug was
closed in and has the information which version is based on which
version.

Thus if there is now a .changes uploaded, the bugs it closes are closed,
no matter if it is a MU or a NMU. And the bts keeps track if those bugs
are closed in the current version.

So a bug only marked to be closed in 1-1.1 will be consider open in 1-2
in the left case, but consider closed in 1-2 in the right case:

     1-2               1-2
      |                 |
      |  1-1.1         1-1.1
      | /               |
     1-1               1.1

To get the information, which package is based on which package, the
debian/changelog file is considered, so you need to have the NMU's
changelog there. (Or you need to close all those bugs again, like it was
done before versioned closes where introduced).

        Bernhard R. Link