Bug#546531: please warn about the dangers of $DEBEMAIL in comments and manpage

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

Package: pbuilder
Severity: wishlist
Version: 0.189
Tags: patch

On Sat, Oct 14, 2006 at 09:56:54PM +0900, Junichi Uekawa wrote:
> Workaround is to use 'debsign' to set your maintainer uploads to the
> proper value.

What is most annoying of this (#367429) bug however, is how easy is to
get trapped into it. Namely: you skim through /etc/pbuilderrc, you
notice DEBEMAIL empty and you say «hey, there should be my name there»
and there you are screwed. I've just discovered, thanks to Ana, that
I've been uploading a lot of "broken" *.changes file due to this. The
above workaround is no solution to that.

My proposal to fix at least the gotcha is to warn a bit more about the
side effects of setting DEBEMAIL in the sample configuration file and in
the pbuilderrc manpage. The former can read:

  # Maintainer value passed to dpkg-genchanges
  # WARNING: DO NOT SET THIS for ordinary package build before uploading,
  # or all your builds will override Maintainer in *.changes files
  DEBEMAIL=""

I'm not sure about the first line (i.e. I haven't checked if pbuilder
uses DEBEMAIL for anything else than dpkg-genchanges), but the other
should be OK. Manpage can have pretty much the same text.

Cheers.

-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
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