[Reportbug-maint] Bug#522010: reportbug: FTBFS with bin-NMU version

[Daniel Schepler]

On Tuesday 31 March 2009 09:14:27 Sandro Tosi wrote:
> And since you don't need to only schedule a simple rebuild, I don't
> see the problem in editing also reportbug/__init__.py .
>
> Moreover, I can't see why you would re-build reportbug on your machine
> and install it; if you do it to change something in the code (for
> example because you're so kind and want to prepare & send us a patch
>
> :) ), you can also edit __init__.py ; if you do it to bring in other
>
> versioned depends, we define none, only some versioned Suggests, so I
> still fail to understand the request itself.
>
> I hope I've clarified our situation, so if you want you can clarify
> better your position :)

OK, let me explain the context.  I'm running a home-brew "pbuildd" script, 
whose purpose is to rebuild the Debian archive (main) using pbuilder, starting 
from the base packages.  Essentially, it just repeatedly goes through the list 
of packages yet to be built, trying to build each one and moving the results 
into a local repository if it succeeds.

I also like to install the locally built packages on the outside system as a 
bit of a sanity test, to check that they're not completely broken.  But if I 
also have the official archives in /etc/apt/sources.list, that tends to confuse 
apt -- for example, sometimes apt will repeatedly think a package is out of 
date and want to upgrade it, but end up installing the same version as before.  
So that's why I have the pbuilder hook script which adds an appropriate "+pbN" 
version to debian/changelog (and that's also useful to make sure an upgrade 
happens when I schedule a rebuild of a package locally for updating 
dependencies, etc.).

I do have a "blacklist" for the hook script for packages where the maintainer 
has explicitly refused to allow this to work (for example, the kernel image 
packages).  But most of the time when something like this bug comes up, it 
works well to have the code extracting the debian/changelog version just chop 
off any +* from the end.
-- 
Daniel Schepler