Hi,
Right now there's no clean way for a Debian derivative to close bugs
specific to their distro in a changelog entry and then distinguish
those from Debian bugs.
I'd like that developers from derivatives would get involved in this
discussion so that we can get a general solution for everyone, as I
think Debian should be responsible for providing the infrastructure
to do that.
As an example, say package foo_1.0-2 is in Debian, then distro Naibed
takes it and modifies some stuff and gets versions foo_1.0-2naibed1
and foo_1.0-2naibed2. If this distro wants to automatically parse
the changelog for version tracking or when including a mix of changelog
entries from Debian and Naibed at upload time, then it needs a way to
distinguish the bugs from versions <= 1.0-2 (Debian specific) to the
ones from versions >= 1.0-2naibed1 (Naibed specific). We cannot assume
that Naibed will not use 'unstable' as the target suite, though.
Currently we have in place the Origin and Bugs fields[0] for the
debian/control file, but those only allow overriding the entire origin
or bts for a package, and not for a specific version. The current
workarounds I've seen to this problem have been:
* Prepending an "Origin" code into each bug number. (Example: Maemo
prepends NB to the bug number, like "Fixes: NB#12345" [1]).
* Appending an "Origin" code into each bug number. (Eample: a different
practice in Maemo, appending @Nokia, like "Closes: #12345@Nokia" [2]).
* Using an URL to qualify the bug number. (Example: I think I've seen
that in some Ubuntu changelogs, but cannot find any example now).
* Using a different "Closes:" name, which just sidetracks the issue
if every derivative have to use a different name, this does not
scale. (Example: Maemo uses "Fixes:" instead of "Closes:" [1],
and there's a proposal in Ubuntu to do something similar with
a different name[3]).
* Appending the "Origin" to the "Closes". (Example: "Closes Ubuntu: #123"
and "Closes: Malone #123").
which are wrong, ugly or may need a central registration place to avoid
collisions either in the mnemonic or the "alternative" closure syntax.
Probably the cleanest one is the "Closes Ubuntu:" approach.
So I'd propose to extend the changelog format to add an optional origin
field in the header, then that information will be preserved after the
upload. Something like this:
foo (1.0-2naibed2) quux; urgency=low, origin=naibed
* Fixed c. (Closes: #322)
-- Naibed Devel <nd@naibed.org> Tue, 3 Oct 2006 05:15:10 +0300
foo (1.0-2naibed1) quux; urgency=low, origin=naibed
* Fixed b. (Closes: #321)
-- Naibed Devel <nd@naibed.org> Tue, 02 May 2006 03:11:39 +0300
foo (1.0-2) unstable; urgency=high
* Fixed a. (Closes: #12345)
-- Debian Devel <dd@debian.org> Thu, 27 Oct 2005 07:12:47 +0300
That origin could be matched against /etc/dpkg/origins. I'm attaching
a PoC patch with those change to dpkg. Probably we'd not want to
output the Origin field in the default mode (assuming Debian or local),
instead of the current implementation which outputs "Origin: debian".
So comments and other proposals welcome!
regards,
guillem
[0] http://lists.debian.org/debian-policy/2000/07/msg00074.html
http://lists.debian.org/debian-policy/2000/11/msg00183.html [4]
[1] https://stage.maemo.org/svn/maemo/projects/haf/trunk/gtk+/debian/changelog
[2] https://stage.maemo.org/svn/maemo/projects/haf/trunk/maemo-launcher/debian/changelog
[3] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ClosingBugsFromChangelog
https://features.launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+spec/changelog-closes-bugs
[4] It was curious to see the different PoV related to derived distros
and bug hoarding at that time.