[buildd-tools-devel] Bug#620758: sbuild: please fail gracefully with --append-to-version/--make-binNMU and no --maintainer

[Jakub Wilk]

Package: sbuild
Version: 0.62.1-1
Severity: wishlist

Both --append-to-version and --make-binNMU option require that 
--maintainer option is used. This is understandable and sort-of 
documented (at least for --make-binNMU). However, the way sbuild fails 
in --maintainer was not provided is suboptimal: it installs all 
build-dependencies and then outputs an error message like this:

| Hack binNMU version
| ───────────────────
|
| Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at /usr/share/perl5/Sbuild/Build.pm line 1351.
| *** Created changelog entry for bin-NMU version 2.3-0.1+justtesting
|
| dpkg-buildpackage
| ─────────────────
|
| dpkg-buildpackage: export CFLAGS from dpkg-buildflags (origin: vendor): -g -O2
| dpkg-buildpackage: export CPPFLAGS from dpkg-buildflags (origin: vendor):
| dpkg-buildpackage: export CXXFLAGS from dpkg-buildflags (origin: vendor): -g -O2
| dpkg-buildpackage: export FFLAGS from dpkg-buildflags (origin: vendor): -g -O2
| dpkg-buildpackage: export LDFLAGS from dpkg-buildflags (origin: vendor):
| parsechangelog/debian: warning:     debian/changelog(l5): badly formatted trailer line
| LINE:  --   Mon, 04 Apr 2011 00:00:56 +0200
| parsechangelog/debian: warning:     debian/changelog(l7): found start of entry where expected more change data or trailer
| LINE: lxml (2.3-0.1) unstable; urgency=low
| parsechangelog/debian: warning:     debian/changelog(l7): found eof where expected more change data or trailer
| dpkg-buildpackage: error: unable to determine source changed by
| dpkg-buildpackage: source package lxml
| dpkg-buildpackage: source version 2.3-0.1+justtesting
| ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
| Build finished at 20110404-0000

Could you please make sbuild:
1. fail earlier;
2. output a more helpful error message?

Thanks in advance!


-- System Information:
Debian Release: wheezy/sid
   APT prefers unstable
   APT policy: (990, 'unstable'), (500, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.38-2-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=pl_PL.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages sbuild depends on:
ii  adduser                       3.112+nmu2 add and remove users and groups
ii  libc6                         2.11.2-11  Embedded GNU C Library: Shared lib
ii  libgcc1                       1:4.6.0-2  GCC support library
ii  libsbuild-perl                0.62.1-1   Tool for building Debian binary pa
ii  libstdc++6                    4.6.0-2    The GNU Standard C++ Library v3
ii  perl                          5.10.1-19  Larry Wall's Practical Extraction 
ii  perl-modules                  5.10.1-19  Core Perl modules

-- 
Jakub Wilk