Package: dh-make Version: 1.20150601 Severity: normal I was experimenting with dh_make for my first time, and used the literal git tag "v1.3-beta" as version.
$ cd my-app-v1.3-beta $ dh_make -p my-app_v1.3-beta As a result, I was greeted with a very generic error message saying: "The directory name you have specified is invalid!" The cause of this message is that it doesn't match the regex /(.*)_([0-9][0-9a- zA-Z+.~-]*)$/ (source: dh_make, sub get_package) So dh_make requires that versions start with a digit, but nothing ever explicitly says so, which is why it took me a lot of experimenting and looking at the source to find out *why* it is "invalid". I suggest that the error message contains (at least when the regex-match fails) something like: "Note that versions must start with a digit." Furthermore, the manual page currently says: "The <packagename> must be all lowercase, digits and dashes." I suggest this should be changed into: "The <packagename> and <version> must be all lowercase, digits and dashes. The <version> can also contain digits, and the symbols plus, dot, tilde. The <version> must start with a digit." This way, a user that didn't read the source of dh_make and doesn't know that rule about versions has a chance of using dh_make correctly. -- System Information: Debian Release: stretch/sid APT prefers testing APT policy: (500, 'testing'), (500, 'oldstable') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Foreign Architectures: i386 Kernel: Linux 4.1.0-1-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores) Locale: LANG=de_DE.utf8, LC_CTYPE=de_DE.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system) Versions of packages dh-make depends on: ii debhelper 9.20150811 ii dpkg-dev 1.18.2 ii make 4.0-8.2 ii perl 5.20.2-6 dh-make recommends no packages. Versions of packages dh-make suggests: ii build-essential 11.7 -- no debconf information
