The long wait for some sort of response is due to having such a high
number of bugs filed against lintian but not enough manpower to keep it maintained. I've just noticed this now since you sent a mail, and I'm subscribed to [email protected] :)

On Wed, 2024-01-24 at 20:58 +0100, Diederik de Haas wrote:

Package: lintian
Version: 2.116.3
Severity: normal

I'm not sure if this belongs to the lintian or developers-reference
package, or both. But it's at least confusing to me in lintian.

Based on this paragraph in developers-reference, I added a ``debian/NEWS.Debian`` file to a package:
6.3.5 Supplementing changelogs with NEWS.Debian files

After building the package and running lintian, I get a warning: incorrect-packaging-filename better: debian/NEWS [debian/NEWS.Debian]

Correct, the news file in the source should be located at debian/NEWS.

So I updated the package by renaming it to ``debian/NEWS``.
Build the package again and run lintian and I get this warning: debian-news-entry-has-strange-distribution UNRELEASED

Note that this warning did NOT show up when I had a
``debian/NEWS.Debian`` file, so it seems to 'require' ``debian/NEWS``.

Well, because this check applies when the news file is in the correct
location, so ends up being installed by dh_installchangelogs into the
binary package and therefore having its contents checked by Debian. It's complaining that the suite says UNRELEASED i.e. it should be unstable or experimental.

``lintian-explain-tags debian-news-entry-has-strange-distribution`` then explains what it's for, mentioning ``NEWS.Debian``.

This is because this tag is being made against the binary (.deb)
package, and in this package the news file is installed in /usr/share/doc/<package>/NEWS.Debian .

So I cloned the lintian repo to make a MR to replace ``NEWS.Debian``
with ``debian/NEWS`` for that tag.
Thinking there may be more such things, I ran ``grep -rn "NEWS.Debian"``
... which returned a LONG list. So I filed this bug instead of the MR.

The incorrect-packaging-filename explainer also has this line:
"Debhelper sometimes adds *.Debian extensions to NEWS, README and TODO files."

So it *sometimes* adds the ``.Debian`` extension (but not always?),
but ``wrong-name-for-debian-news-file`` says this:
"The Debian news file must be installed as /usr/share/doc/*pkg*/NEWS.Debian.gz with exactly that capitalization"

I'm assuming the *must* word complies with RFC2119 and was deliberately chosen?

incorrect-packaging-filename explainer could probably be updated to
clarify. It's probably worded like that because native packages don't
get the .Debian suffix added to some stuff like TODO.

So it's confusing to first get a warning about using ``NEWS.Debian`` to
then get a warning which uses ``NEWS.Debian`` in its explanation.

I don't know if (some?) references are outdated and should use the
'new' name or whether it's all technically correct and just confusing as
hell for 'newbies' like me, in which case an explanation in developers-reference would be much appreciated.

Lintian checks both the source packaging and the binary packages
produced, so its output will refer to things in both. In the source, the
news file must be located at debian/NEWS. According to the dh_installchangelogs(1) manpage, this is then installed to /usr/share/doc/<package>/NEWS.Debian in the binary package, and since
Lintian found the issues like debian-news-entry-has-strange-distribution
there, it refers to NEWS.Debian rather than NEWS.

You're right, the developer's reference seems to have no explanation
detailing this. You could open a bug against developers-reference, or
reopen and reassign this bug there.

--
Maytham

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