Title: Handling of changelog bug closures in Debian derived distros Status: Draft Author: Guillem Jover Thread: https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2006/11/msg00100.html Last-Change: 2006-11-14 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: #12345@Nokia" [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 collision 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 Tue, 3 Oct 2006 05:15:10 +0300 foo (1.0-2naibed1) quux; urgency=low, origin=naibed * Fixed b. (Closes: #321) -- Naibed Devel Tue, 02 May 2006 03:11:39 +0300 foo (1.0-2) unstable; urgency=high * Fixed a. (Closes: #12345) -- Debian Devel 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, instead of the current implementation which outputs "Origin: debian". So comments welcome! [0] https://lists.debian.org/debian-policy/2000/07/msg00074.html https://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 at that time.