Hi! On Wed, 2026-01-28 at 00:28:14 +0530, Nilesh Patra wrote: > Package: dpkg > Severity: normal > X-Debbugs-Cc: [email protected] > <mailto:[email protected]>.org > Control: affects -1 + src:lintian > Version: 1.23.5
> dpkg fails to build package if there are more than one mail address > present in "Maintainer" field. > This check however does not happen for "Changed-By" field. I thought about also covering Changed-By, but because it either gets initialized from the Maintainer field, which is already validated, or specified via CLI options by the user calling the tools, I thought this was not safe to validate yet, as it could break for example buildd invocations, where I've not done any checks whether this could be safe. But thanks for the reminder! I've prepared local changes that I'll push into a branch to check the values for those arguments, and will contact the buildd admins and release team, to check whether this new enforcing would be safe to apply. For lintian, I'm not sure whether dpkg doing any validation will make a difference though, as dpkg is only a producer, and not a consumer of the .changes file. So it only validates what gets passed to dpkg-buildpackage and dpkg-genchanges via CLI options, but not the files themselves if pre-generated. > If this gets added, we can likely get rid of "too-many-contacts" tag > in lintian and delegate the responsibility entirely to dpkg. I think that depends on how lintian is currently testing this. And it might still make sense to keep the check, given that we have tools such as mergechanges from devscripts, that might end up mangling the .changes file into an invalid one for example (where dpkg is long out of the loop). Thanks, Guillem
