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: [EMAIL PROTECTED]" [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 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Tue, 3 Oct 2006 05:15:10 +0300 foo (1.0-2naibed1) quux; urgency=low, origin=naibed * Fixed b. (Closes: #321) -- Naibed Devel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Tue, 02 May 2006 03:11:39 +0300 foo (1.0-2) unstable; urgency=high * Fixed a. (Closes: #12345) -- Debian Devel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]