Re: [PATCH] debian: Rework historical changelog

[Valters Jansons <valter.jansons@gmail.com>]

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On Wed, Apr 14, 2021 at 12:31 PM Michael Tremer
<michael.tremer(a)ipfire.org> wrote:
> 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.

Understandable - and I completely agree in the benefit of having the
package available in Debian to be pulled into all Debian derivative
distributions that way.

The building problem is not directly linked with Ubuntu. Instead, it
is about auto_test failing, due to `make check` failing on the root
Makefile. Testsuite for libloc in the root directory passes, however
the check-recursive target then tries to `make check` inside of po
subdirectory which fails with: "No rule to make target
'../src/python/__init__.py', needed by 'libloc.pot'.  Stop."

The broken scenario that needs patching can simplified to:
$ autoreconf --install --symlink
$ intltoolize --force --automake
$ ./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc --libdir=/lib
$ make -j$(nproc)
$ make -j$(nproc) check

I will shortly provide a patch with an updated po/POTFILES.in as
generated by `rm po/POTFILES.in && make po/POTFILES.in`.

> > 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 UNRELEASED distribution is tagged for that reason, as to signal
that a package should not be built from that source. I was simply
highlighting a development workflow in place for one Debian package
which tracks changes during development, where individual
commits/patches also update the changelog file. This approach ensures
that at release time only the s/UNRELEASED/unstable/ replacement needs
to happen along with `update-maintainer` -- without having to worry
about collecting the list of changes.

--Valters