Bug#430354: lintian: Please support historical changelogs

Package: lintian
Version: 1.23.28
Severity: wishlist

Hi,

The dhcp3 source package has one malformed (by current
standards)
changelog entry (the very first one). I learned at Debconf,
that the
format wasn't always defined, so I'm assuming this entry is
from that
era.

It'd be nice not to get Lintian complaints about it.

regards

Andrew

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 4.0
  APT prefers stable
  APT policy: (500, 'stable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Shell:  /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.18-3-686
Locale: LANG=en_AU.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_AU.UTF-8
(charmap=UTF-8)

Versions of packages lintian depends on:
ii  binutils               2.17-3            The GNU
assembler, linker and bina
ii  diffstat               1.43-2            produces graph
of changes introduc
ii  dpkg-dev               1.13.25           package
building tools for Debian
ii  file                   4.17-5etch1       Determines file
type using "magic"
ii  gettext                0.16.1-1          GNU
Internationalization utilities
ii  intltool-debian        0.35.0+20060710.1 Help i18n of
RFC822 compliant conf
ii  libparse-debianchangel 1.0-1             parse Debian
changelogs and output
ii  man-db                 2.4.3-6           The on-line
manual pager
ii  perl [libdigest-md5-pe 5.8.8-7           Larry Wall's
Practical Extraction 

lintian recommends no packages.

-- no debconf information


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Andrew Pollock <apollockdebian.org> writes:

> Package: lintian
> Version: 1.23.28
> Severity: wishlist

> The dhcp3 source package has one malformed (by current
standards)
> changelog entry (the very first one). I learned at
Debconf, that the
> format wasn't always defined, so I'm assuming this
entry is from that
> era.

> It'd be nice not to get Lintian complaints about it.

This is somewhat difficult to fix just because of how
changelog checking
is implemented, but it also raises questions of how far back
lintian
should check and when it should start ignoring problems. 
I'm guessing
that changing this may require changes to the Perl module we
use to parse
changelogs as well.

Hm.  The other issue here is that various things in Debian
want to
automatically parse changelog files, including historic
entries.  For
example, packages.debian.org also complains about the
changelog for the
last entry in dhcp3 (it uses the same Perl module).  If I
were you, I'd
just add a closing line to that first changelog entry with
the same
information as the next entry as an approximation (unless
you know the
actual date).  Looking at the last few entries in the
changelog, I'm
guessing that this wouldn't be the first time that someone
did that; I
doubt that 0.5.9-1 and 0.5.7-1 were truly released in the
exact same
second.  I can understand the aversion to changing historic
information,
though.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rradebian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org
/~eagle/>


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On Sun, Jul 01, 2007 at 10:01:01AM -0700, Russ Allbery
wrote:
> Andrew Pollock <apollockdebian.org> writes:
> > The dhcp3 source package has one malformed (by
current standards)
> > changelog entry (the very first one). I learned at
Debconf, that the
> > format wasn't always defined, so I'm assuming this
entry is from that
> > era.
> > It'd be nice not to get Lintian complaints about
it.
> 
> This is somewhat difficult to fix just because of how
changelog checking
> is implemented, but it also raises questions of how far
back lintian
> should check and when it should start ignoring
problems.  I'm guessing
> that changing this may require changes to the Perl
module we use to parse
> changelogs as well.

FWIW, Parse:ebianCha
ngelog tries to identify the start of old legacy
entries and stops parsing there. In this case however there
is really no
sign whatsoever that the format might change.

Gruesse,
-- 
Frank Lichtenheld <djpigdebian.org>
www: http://www.djpig.de/


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