"No section found" for certain debs

[João Pedro Seara]

Hello,

In certain debs we get the error from reprepro "No section found" when trying to upload it using dput.

We can reproduce it using the package from Microsoft Teams:

wget https://packages.microsoft.com/repos/ms-teams/pool/main/t/teams/teams_1.4.00.4855_amd64.deb
changestool --create $DEB.changes adddeb teams_1.4.00.4855_amd64.deb
changestool teams_1.4.00.4855_amd64.deb.changes setdistribution bionic-personal
changestool teams_1.4.00.4855_amd64.deb.changes verify

The output of last command will be:

"ERROR: No section specified in './teams_1.4.00.4855_amd64.deb'!"

dput will still work, but then repreprod will complain of a "No section found".

Further inspection reveals the problem is in the following line of the generated changes file:

Files:
 fc0545d54a33154b829573ade4e5b084 21249689 - optional teams_1.4.00.4855_amd64.deb

The workaround is to replace the "-" for "default". The following oneliner does it:

sed -i 's/\-\ optional/default\ optional/' teams_1.4.00.4855_amd64.deb

In any case I believe that this shouldn't be the reason for changestool or reprepro to fail.

Thanks,
JP

[Dimitri John Ledkov (xnox)]

The teams .deb package https://packages.microsoft.com/repos/ms-teams/pool/main/t/teams/teams_1.4.00.4855_amd64.deb
does not comply with the Debian Policy for .deb packages.

reprepro is meant to be used with Debian Policy compliant packages.

Please fix your teams.deb package, to specify `Section:` there.

I.e. Section: net

Default is not a valid section name. Please see sections at https://packages.debian.org/stable/ . It matters, because once installed, people are shown UI and installed packages on the system can be grouped by section.

You can check your packages with lintian. Some of your packaging choices are intentional (i.e. embedded-library), but things like Section, should be simple enough to fix

$ lintian teams_1.4.00.4855_amd64.deb
....
W: teams: recommended-field teams_1.4.00.4855_amd64.deb Section
....

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for reprepro (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]