[Buildd-tools-devel] Bug#475777: sbuild: Add support for appending a tag to version numbers

[Timothy G Abbott]

Package: sbuild
Version: 0.57.0-1
Severity: wishlist
Tags: patch

I think sbuild should support appending a string to the version number of 
the package at build time, similar in function to --binNMU, but with 
support for appending arbitrary strings to the version numbers.

To make clear the use case, I should explain how I've been using this 
feature in the past.  The MIT Debian-Athena project 
(http://debathena.mit.edu) has since summer 2007 been using a monkey patch 
implementation of this feature to build Debian packages for 
Athena-specific software and new software that we've written for all 
current releases of Debian and Ubuntu. In order to upload the builds on 
different releases to the same repository, we add tags of the form 
~debian4.0 or ~ubuntu7.10 to the version numbers of the binary packages. 
These particular tags are chosen so that if the user upgrades to a newer 
release, their packages will upgrade, while ensuring that if the package 
ever ends up in Debian proper with the same version number, they will 
upgrade to the upstream Debian version.

I've attached a patch that adds support for this.  It adds a new argument 
--append-to-version=<string>.  The patch documents the feature in the man 
page, and also fixes some minor documentation errors related to the binNMU 
feature.

I've attached an additional patch that cleans up some of the code related 
to binNMUs because with my changes, binNMU_version returns the original 
version if nothing is being appended to the version and binNMUver is not 
specified.

One thing that I do not handle in my patch is how one should append failed 
builds using --append-to-version to the job log, since I'm not familiar 
with the parsers for the job log that are in use.  My patch contains a 
comment noting this in the relevant section of the code; this should be 
replaced with whatever the right solution is.

 	-Tim Abbott
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