Re: [PATCH] debian: Rework historical changelog

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

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2424 bytes --]

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).

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

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

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