[buildd-tools-devel] BinNMU changelog handling for Multi-Arch: same packages

[Jonathan Nieder]

Hi Raphael,

Raphael Hertzog wrote:

> I know that in the long term you're in favor of moving the changelog in
> the package metadata and I agree with this plan. But IMO we must find
> an interim solution in the mean time.
>
> Here's a suggestion. Please share your thoughts:
>
> 1/ we modify dh_installchangelog to strip the binary-only changelog entry
>    for Multi-Arch: same packages
[...]
> 2/ we modify dpkg to allow co-installation of M-A: same packages which share the
>    same source version regardless of the binary version
>
> 3/ we modify sbuild to add the required "binary-only=yes" in the binNMU
>    changelog entries. Here's a sample header line:
>
>    ftplib (3.1-1-9+b1) unstable; urgency=low, binary-only=yes

(2) and (3) sound like very good things.

Wouldn't (1) be throwing away information, unless the stripped
information goes into another file?

Making the stripped info go into another file sounds fine to me.

A crazier possibility is teaching the unpack procedure to treat
/usr/share/doc/<package>/changelog.Debian.gz specially, collecting the
binary-only changelog entries and merging them in a single file, but
that's a pretty severe layering violation and it would not be easy to
find which entries are no longer relevant when shrinking the set of
installed arches for a package.

Thanks,
Jonathan