MJR's slef-reflections

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Submitted at 1816 on 27 Apr by James Vega

I uploaded a backport of devscripts which handles the new .changes format on April 24th.

Submitted at 1953 on 27 Apr by MJ Ray

So I see... I already grabbed debsign from unstable's devscripts source (my private key isn't on a debian system), but why did the .changes format change incompatibly so quickly and why wasn't this announced itself? Or was it and I just missed it?

Submitted at 2044 on 27 Apr by James Vega

That's something that people from the dpkg team would have to answer but I think the idea was to get support for the new formats into Lenny so that they can be used in Lenny+1 instead of having to wait for Lenny+2.

The bigger problem was that the myriad tools which parse .changes files didn't do so in a Format aware way and were therefore broken. I can't speak for the other scripts but the ones that are provided in devscripts (debsign, dscverify, and mergechanges) have been updated to only act on Formats that they recognize, which will minimize the impact of future changes like this.

There was a post to debian-devel on March 28th asking for testing of the updated dpkg as well as an announcement on debian-devel-announce on April 11th outlining the changes in the new dpkg upload which described the new .changes format and indicated some tools were broken.

Submitted at 0823 on 28 Apr by MJ Ray

OK, so I missed the implications of the announcement, partly because nothing suggested that these were going to break uploads.

Also, I thought the "important" change bit referred to the trigger support (which was noisy enough in development that I'd seen it before), not the file format changes. The announcement order appears to reflect what's important to the dpkg developers, rather than the big news for dpkg users.

Oh well. Fixed now, AFAICT. Just was a bit cheesed off yesterday at wasting time reuploading.

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