Fix the changelog

git-ubuntu attempts to put together a changelog entry, but it will likely have problems. Fix it to make sure it follows the standards. See committing your changes for information about what it should look like.

Merging series

The article series provides guidance on performing package merges.

Process overview:
How to do a merge:

  1. Preliminary steps

  2. Merge process

  3. Fix the changelog (this article)

  4. Upload a PPA

  5. Test the new build

  6. Submit Merge Proposal

Extra:

Add dropped changes

If you dropped any changes (due to upstream fixes), you must note them in the changelog entry:

  * Drop Changes:
    - Foo: change to bar
      [Fixed in 1.2.3-4]

Format any new added changes

If you added any new changes, they should be in their own section in the changelog:

  * New Changes:
    - Bar: change to foo
    - Baz: adjust for Foo changes

Commit the changelog fix

$ git commit debian/changelog -m changelog

No changes to debian/changelog

The range old/ubuntu..logical/<version> should contain no changes to debian/changelog at all. We do not consider this part of the logical delta. So, any commits that contain only changes to debian/changelog should be dropped.

Note

If you diff your final logical tag against the Ubuntu package it analyses, the diff should be empty, except:

  1. All changes to debian/changelog:

    We deliberately exclude these from the logical tag, relying on commit messages instead.

  2. The change that update-maintainer introduced, and (rarely) similar changes like a change to Vcs-Git headers to point to an Ubuntu VCS instead.

    For the purposes of this workflow, these are not considered part of our “logical delta”, and instead are re-added at the end.

Tip

You can use the execsnoop-bpfcc tool from the bpfcc-tools package to find what debhelper scripts were called for a certain package. This is helpful for debugging what scripts were called, and what parameters were passed to them.

For example:

$ sudo execsnoop-bpfcc -n multipath

Now in another shell run:

$ sudo apt install --reinstall multipath-tools

In the original shell, you should see something like:

PCOMM            PID     PPID    RET ARGS
multipath-tools  13939   13931     0 /var/lib/dpkg/info/multipath-tools.prerm upgrade 0.9.4-5ubuntu3
multipath-tools  13951   13931     0 /var/lib/dpkg/info/multipath-tools.postrm upgrade 0.9.4-5ubuntu3
multipath-tools  13959   13956     0 /var/lib/dpkg/info/multipath-tools.postinst configure 0.9.4-5ubuntu3
multipathd       14009   1         0 /sbin/multipathd -d -s

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