[Pkg-xfce-devel] README: Proposal for unreleased packages/changelog entries

[Simon Huggins]

On Sat, Dec 17, 2005 at 11:34:11PM +0200, Jani Monoses wrote:
> is each svn commit supposed to go along with an entry in
> debian/changelog under the current revision which is going to be the
> next upload to the archives? And if no such rev exist create one?

On Sun, Dec 18, 2005 at 03:21:10PM +0200, Jani Monoses wrote:
> there are some packages - mostly plugins - which are in svn but not
> uploaded to the archives yet.  What are the procedures for testing
> them, or the criteria which need to be satisfied so they can be
> uploaded?  Also xfce4-terminal has an updated revision since november
> in svn, but it's not in unstable.

Right.  I think what I'd like to standardise on is a changelog entry like:
	xfce4-session (4.2.3-2) UNRELEASED; urgency=low

	 * blah blah
	
	 -- Yves-Alexis Perez <corsac at corsac.net>  Sun, 06 Nov 2005 22:01:12 +0100

That way it's easy to do:
	[/pkg-xfce/desktop/trunk]$ grep UNREL */debian/changelog
to find out which packages need uploading.

Also it means that we don't end up with changelogs which contain
versions which were never released.

If your email address isn't in Uploaders (mostly thinking of Jani but
any others too) then use the name/email of someone who is or don't put a
real name there so that whoever does upload it replaces it.

On top of this I'd like to propose that whereever possible we use a
common format for changes which are made by more than one person.

I personally like:

 * (Simon Huggins)
   * blah1
   * blah2
 * (Yves-Alexis Perez)
   * blah3
   * blah4
etc.

And I personally prefer the "closes: #nnnnnn" form of closing bugs and
aligning that on the righthand side of the changelog.

If anyone wants to argue strenuously for another form then please do so
here.

Please DO NOT change old changelogs to reflect these changes.
Changelogs should only ever be added to as per policy/best-practice (I
forget which).

It'd be good to swap the current top entries to UNRELEASED for those
packages which aren't in the archive though.

Also Jani, yes I think you do want to add a changelog entry which closes
that bug to the battery plugin as long as you are happy that it works.
I guess changelog entries would ideally hit at the same time as the
patch to the package, yes.

In terms of testing unreleased packages I'd assume that you've all
looked at the debdiff output of both the source (dsc) and the binary
packages (changes) from the version in unstable as that's what I tend to
look at before I upload.

Otherwise useful tests are lintian and linda (are there other tools I
forgot?).

This mail became a bit more of a standards mail than I thought it would.
If you could all say which bits you agree/disagree with taht would be
useful and then I'll make a webpage with the best practices so we can
point new people at it.

Simon.

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