Bug#866998: pgpmode=next/previous not working as expected?

[Osamu Aoki]

Hi,

On Mon, Jul 03, 2017 at 02:52:21PM +0200, Laurent Bigonville wrote:
> retitle 866998 uscan: dpkg: error: version '1:-0' has bad syntax: version
> number is empty
...
> OK there is a PEBKAC issue here, the signature was NOT valid, so it's
> expected that it's not matching.
> 
> But there is still an issue with the dpkg error from the output above I
> believe
> 
> dpkg: error: version '1:-0' has bad syntax: version number is empty

Package version consists of 3 parts.  The word "version" is overloaded
for narrow "upstream version" and "package version".  It's a common
practice around dpkg.

So "version" to be '1:-0' means 
        EPOCH="1"
        VERSION=""
        REVISION="1"

And the error message is given by the dpkg command invoked from uscan
and it describes situation correctly.  I see no problem with this
situation.

You can also do minimal soul search as:

$ grep dpkg /usr/bin/uscan
tarball.  The ordering of versions is decided by B<dpkg --compare-versions>.
dpkg(1), mk-origtargz(1), perlre(1), uupdate(1), devscripts.conf(5)
    if (system("dpkg", "--compare-versions", "1:${mangled_lastversion}-0", "eq", "1:${newversion}-0") >> 8 == 0) {
    } elsif (system("dpkg", "--compare-versions", "1:${mangled_lastversion}-0", "gt", "1:${newversion}-0") >> 8 == 0) {
$ dpkg --compare-versions 1 lt 2; echo $?
0
$ dpkg --compare-versions 1 gt 2; echo $?
1
$ dpkg --compare-versions "1:-" gt 2; echo $?
dpkg: error: version '1:-' has bad syntax: revision number is empty
2
$ 

If you really wish to fix error message, please reassign this bug to
dpkg.

If you have no objection, I will close this bug in devscripts later.

Regards,

Osamu