Bug#858287: dep3changelog: parsing is too strict about blank lines

[Nishanth Aravamudan]

Package: devscripts
Version: 2.16.8ubuntu1
Severity: normal
Tags: patch

Dear Maintainer,

dep3changelog currently fails to extract bug information from `git
format-patch` output, including the first example from
http://dep.debian.net/deps/dep3/.

This is because dep3changelog exits its main processing loop upon seeing
a line matching /^---/ (correctly) or /^\s*$/ (incorrectly).

The DEP3 spec has a specific structure mentioned, which refers to one or
two headers, where a headers start on a non-empty line and ends on an
empty line, but also says "Any parser that expect those fields in patch
headers should also accept non-structured content and simply append the
non-structured content to the value of the Description field." I believe
the example from the dep3 page (as well as most `git format-patch`
output) will include non-structured content in the form of the commit
message. Given that we only care about the first line of the commit
message (we really only want the shorthand), I think it is ok to just
skip any empty lines until we see the /^---/. We could extend the parser
to count headers and also stop after the second header, but this seems
like overkill for a fairly simple parser (that doesn't really care about
the header count, it just needs to not quit before seeing all the
structured fields).

Thanks,
Nish


-- System Information:
Debian Release: stretch/sid
  APT prefers zesty
  APT policy: (500, 'zesty')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 4.10.0-8-generic (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_AU.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_AU.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)

-- 
Nishanth Aravamudan
Ubuntu Server
Canonical Ltd