Package: svn-buildpackage Version: 0.6.21-0.1 Severity: normal svn-buildpackage defaults to adding dummy changelog entries that say only "NOT RELEASED YET", and denote no actual change to the package. This seems to be intended to prevent someone accidentially listing changes in the previous, released changelog entry. In my experience with the Debian perl group, this is unncessary, and can even be harmful.
It's unneccessary because dch uses heuristics to determine if a version of a package has been uploaded. Setting DEBCHANGE_RELEASE_HEURISTIC=changelog makes it use a heuristic that is designed to work well with packages maintained by a group in subversion. dch -i will never add changed to a released version of the package; it will automatically add a new UNRELEASED changelog entry if none is yet present. The dummy stanza doesn't need to be there for this to work. It can be harmful because: * I've seen packages released with changelogs that claimed they were "* NOT RELEASED YET", mixed in with other changes. 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. * Any benefit of adding the dummy entries becomes nil if they're not consistently added. In my experience with the large number of packages maintained by the Debian perl group, only a small fraction had the dummy entries added. Anyone who relied on them would end up doing the wrong thing. Contrast to proper use of dch, which always avoids doing the wrong thing. -- System Information: Debian Release: lenny/sid APT prefers unstable APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (1, 'experimental') Architecture: i386 (i686) Kernel: Linux 2.6.22-1-686 (SMP w/1 CPU core) Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash Versions of packages svn-buildpackage depends on: ii devscripts 2.10.6 Scripts to make the life of a Debi ii file 4.21-2 Determines file type using "magic" ii libsvn-perl 1.4.4dfsg1-1 Perl bindings for Subversion ii liburi-perl 1.35.dfsg.1-1 Manipulates and accesses URI strin ii perl 5.8.8-7 Larry Wall's Practical Extraction ii subversion 1.4.4dfsg1-1 Advanced version control system ii unp 1.0.12 unpack (almost) everything with on ii wget 1.10.2-3 retrieves files from the web svn-buildpackage recommends no packages. -- no debconf information -- see shy jo
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