On Mon, Oct 16, 2017 at 11:54:20AM +1100, Ben Finney wrote: > Ross Vandegrift <r...@kallisti.us> writes: > > Good question. I guess I think of a changelog as history - so changes > > I made on 1.15 go with 1.15 whether it was released or not. > > Thanks for explaining your perspective. > > That perspective, I think, does not match the stated purpose for the > Debian package changelog: to inform *recipients* of the package about > changes between *releases* of that package. > > So, a further question: Why did “changes made on 1.15” not simply > continue accumulating changes? You say it was not released; that > should mean the changelog entry is not closed, because a changelog > entry documents a *release* of the Debian package.
The entry for 1.15 stopped accumulating changes when upstream released 1.16 before I finished. I continued work on the new release, and began a new entry. At that time I didn't know this would cause issues. I vaguely remember looking at other packages for guidance. I probably found plenty of examples: grepping for unreleased versions in /usr/share/doc/*/changelog.Debian.gz find a few hundred hits on my laptop. > > But if I think of the changelog as telling others about changes in a > > release, then it makes sense to squash them. > > Yes, that's the purpose specified for the Debian package changelog. Cool, I'm glad to know this now. But where is it specified? A quick re-read of the changelog sections of the policy manual, developer's reference, and maintainer's guide didn't turn anything up. Did I miss it? I'm not trying to argue about the policy. I just want to make sure that new people can learn this from the documentation and maybe avoid some headaches. > > Either way, I try to avoid it now. So it's really just dealing with > > the previous entries. > > For already-released versions you will need to deal with closing those > bugs manually anyway. Others in this thread have said that an upload with dpkg-genchanges -v will trigger the bugs to be closed. Are you saying that's incorrect? Thanks, Ross
