On 9/2/24 11:47 AM, Colin Watson wrote:
On Mon, Sep 02, 2024 at 11:15:50AM -0400, Jonathan Kamens wrote:
I was suggesting that perhaps the root cause of /why/ the .deb files are not
identical is because if there's no timestamp in the trailer line of the top
changelog entry, that impacts the contents of the .deb.
IMO your debian/changelog should be syntactically well-formed (per
https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-source.html#debian-changelog-debian-changelog)
even when you haven't finalized it. The exact value of the timestamp
isn't very important (you can let "dch" pick something when you first
add something to the unreleased changelog, and "dch -r" will update it
when you're ready to make an upload), but it should be present. Leaving
it empty isn't the usual practice among other developers as far as I've
seen, and it's just making trouble for yourself.
I leave it empty exactly because the build scripts complain when I do
that, so that I'll remember to finalize it with the correct date before
I put out a release.
I also leave it empty to remind me to review the commit history and make
sure there isn't anything I forgot to add to the changelog before I do
the release.
If I put a placeholder date in it then the odds are that I'll forget to
update it and the changelog will ship with a date that isn't what I
wanted to ship with.
"isn't the usual practice among other developers" <-🤷 I've been doing
this whole open source software maintenance thing for nearly 40 years.
I'm kind of OK with sometimes doing things my own way rather than the
way most other people do it.
"making trouble for yourself" <- It's the good kind of trouble, IMO. YMMV.
 jik
