Bug#878967: debian-policy: clarify purpose of debian/changelog

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Sean Whitton <spwhitton@spwhitton.name> writes:
> On Wed, Oct 18 2017, Russ Allbery wrote:

>> It's probably worth noting here that while debian-mentors has
>> converged to a very strong consensus that unreleased versions of
>> packages should not appear in debian/changelog, the consensus about
>> that in the broader project is nowhere near as strong.

> I was active on -mentors relatively recently and I don't think I
> understand what you mean when you say "unreleased versions of packages
> should not appear in debian/changelog".

> Do you mean that successive uploads to mentors.debian.net are expected
> to re-use the same Debian version number?

My impression of discussion on debian-mentors over the past few years is
that most of the people active in sponsoring have as a requirement that
all changelogs from versions of a package that weren't uploaded to Debian
be consolidated and the version of a new package upload, as finally
uploaded to the archive, always be one higher than the last version
uploaded to Debian proper.

This makes a lot of sense in the context of nearly all packages that flow
through sponsorship, and I realize it's a correction for the very early
days of mentors.debian.net when people tended to bump the version for
every package they made available for review, and there were a ton of
changelog entries generated from back and forth discussions with mentors
that never saw the archive.  That's obviously not very useful.

But I feel like that sensible guideline hardened, during repeated
discussion, into something that's sometimes presented as a hard and fast
rule that one should *always* do this in Debian packaging.  Yet, I've seen
a lot of cases where experienced DDs retain intermediate unreleased
versions in the changelog for various reasons, so I'm a bit dubious of it
as a concrete rule, even though it almost always makes sense in the
specific context of sponsored uploads.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>