Bug#830968: dch --bpo inserts an empty line in debian/changelog

[Adam D. Barratt]

On Wed, 2016-07-13 at 13:51 +0200, Thomas Goirand wrote:
> Using dch to build backports, I'm doing:
> dch --bpo -m ""

Out of interest, purely because I've seen people be confused before, are
you assuming that -m is "message" here? Given that --bpo starts a new
stanza, --maintmaint (which is what "-m" is the short form of) doesn't
make a great deal of sense.

> unfortunately, this makes this kind of changelog:
> 
> foo (1.2.3-4~bpo8+1) jessie-backports; urgency=medium
> 
>   * Rebuild for jessie-backports.
>   *
> 
>  -- Thomas Goirand <zigo at debian.org>  SOME-DATE
> 
> Notice the empty line. To remove it, I then need to do:
> sed -i -e 's/^  \* $/d' debian/changelog
> 
> which is annoying. Is there a way to have dch not produce
> this empty line? So far, I haven't seen it. If not, please
> add such an option. If it exists, please let me know how
> to do it, and sorry for filing such a user-support bug
> (though I haven't found how, and probably it'd be nice
> to fix the manpage to have the --bpo option tell how to
> do what I need).

I can't see one, but it's a fairly trivial change:

diff --git a/scripts/debchange.pl b/scripts/debchange.pl
index db52b60..e4bd2cb 100755
--- a/scripts/debchange.pl
+++ b/scripts/debchange.pl
@@ -1252,7 +1252,7 @@ if (($opt_i || $opt_n || $opt_bn || $opt_qa ||
$opt_R || $opt_s || $opt_team ||
            print O "  * Rebuild for $bpo_dist.\n";
            $line = 1;
        }
-       if (@closes_text or $TEXT) {
+       if (@closes_text or $TEXT or $EMPTY_TEXT) {
            foreach (@closes_text) { format_line($_, 1); }
            if (length $TEXT) { format_line($TEXT, 1); }
        } elsif ($opt_news) {

Regards,

Adam