Re: [PATCH] debian: Rework historical changelog

[Michael Tremer <michael.tremer@ipfire.org>]

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Hello,

> On 13 Apr 2021, at 17:41, Valters Jansons <valter.jansons(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Apr 13, 2021 at 6:38 PM Peter Müller <peter.mueller(a)ipfire.org> wrote:
>> Eventually, we hoped libloc would be used by other distributions as well, since a decent
>> part of the open source community is facing license trouble after MaxMind changed their
>> terms and conditions. I remember Michael having a discussion with some members of the
>> Debian development team, but my memories fail me when it comes to it's results.
>> 
>> Therefore, I am not sure if libloc is ready in a way we would move from "UNRELEASED" to
>> "unstable". On the one hand, it is used in production for IPFire since a while, on the
>> other hand, nobody else is using the libloc _code_ as such - at least no one I am aware of.
> 
> I am in that boat actually, as I ended up looking at the repository
> with the goal of migrating away from MaxMind, however I am on Ubuntu.
> The build currently fails due to a bad test invocation which I hope to
> take a closer look at. Additionally I would like to update the
> debhelper compatibility level while I am at it, but that also needs to
> be looked into - whether the resulting build is the same, however for
> that I would like to have the automated build tooling in place (which
> needs those test changes).

It should work just fine on Ubuntu. We are only dependent on a POSIX-compatible system so Windows might be a bit tricky. I used to build it on Mac OS X, too.

If there is interest, I wouldn’t mind publishing Ubuntu packages. Better would of course be to make it an upstream package.

> Regarding the topic of "UNRELEASED" vs "unstable": Having "unstable"
> for a _released_ version is the standard way for Debian-native
> packages.

unstable is right for us then.

> You can take the `debmirror` tool as a simple example. The official
> upstream changelog there can be seen in the source containing
> "unstable": https://salsa.debian.org/debian/debmirror/-/blob/debian/1%252.33/debian/changelog
> 
> As people are working on future changes, "UNRELEASED" is used for
> tracking changes until the release is tagged (by replacing
> "UNRELEASED" with "unstable", and updating the maintainer name/email
> and date). A sample of work in progress in source can be seen:
> https://salsa.debian.org/debian/debmirror/-/blob/0f9992cdb9b535bd42958a9ff6cb07723f064006/debian/changelog

We normally do not build packages with a development version.

> The tool is available in Ubuntu repositories as well, where additional
> patches are applied -- replacing Debian defaults with Ubuntu defaults
> as required for the package. As a result, in Ubuntu a separate version
> with a 'ubuntu' suffix gets created, while the history still lists
> "unstable" throughout from its upstream:
> https://changelogs.ubuntu.com/changelogs/pool/universe/d/debmirror/debmirror_2.33ubuntu1/changelog
> 
> --Valters

-Michael