Thanks Andreas and Christian for the updates/comments. I agree that I should have been more verbose in the changelog. I'm tracing all the commits to learn more about packaging. I was playing with gbp for updating upstream. I really like how it works with git! No worries, my time was not wasted anyway.
I talked to Christian briefly about the symbol file. He added one for liblinear4. I have a question about this file. The symbol file I generated looks a bit different from liblinear4.symbols, in which several lines start with (c++) and contain the exact parameters. I couldn't figure out how to make dpkg-gensymbols produce this.