Support package version found in branches when specifying version numbers in recipe

[Mathias Gug]

When writing a recipe to backport a package from the development release to a stable release, I'd like to be able to set the version number in the recipe to use the package version found in debian/changelog from one of the bzr branch.

Example:

In the development release, package foo has version 1.0-1. I'd like to create a recipe to build a backport of package foo for the stable release lucid which should have the following version: 1.0-1~lucid1.

I'd like to specify the version number in the recipe using a substitution variable so that I don't have to edit the recipe whenever there is a new version available in the development release:

  deb-version {pkgversion}~{release}1

[Aaron Bentley (abentley)]

So this is an alternative to {debupstream}?

[Mathias Gug (mathiaz)]

Excerpts from Aaron Bentley's message of Wed Aug 25 16:23:59 UTC 2010:
> So this is an alternative to {debupstream}?
>

Yes. IIUC given a package foo which version is 1.0-1, {debupstream} would
be 1.0. I'd like to be able to get 1.0-1 as well.

--
Mathias Gug
Ubuntu Developer http://www.ubuntu.com

[janisozaur (janisozaur)]

How about adding a substitution that could be filled in from within the build script?
Example:
specify revision number as "deb-version 0+{script:path/to/some/script}"
then while building "path/to/some/script" would be executed and stdout from it used as a substitution.

I would certainly like this option, I'm not sure there would be many use cases and if it wouldn't violate some constraints (you could limit this output to say [a-zA-Z0-9], 20 characters, one line).

[Aaron Bentley (abentley)]

Janisozaur, that would be arbitrary code execution, which we do not permit in the tree-building step.

[janisozaur (janisozaur)]

That's what I though. How about postponing substitution until the build stage?

[Aaron Bentley (abentley)]

We don't want to postpone substitution because we want to be able to determine whether to abort the build after building the tree, and one reason for aborting the build is because a build with that debversion has already been uploaded. Postponing substitution would break such tests.

[James Westby (james-w)]

I think this should be called

  {debversion}

and also allow specifying a branch to read debian/changelog from, defaulting to the resulting
tree I guess.

Maybe debupstream et. al. should also take that parameter?

Thanks,

James

[Jelmer Vernooij (jelmer)]

I've submitted an MP for this.

Allowing non-base branches to also support this variable is not trivial, I'll file a separate bug about that. Once we do it for {debversion} it should be easy to also do it for {debupstream} and {debupstream-base} though.

[Robert Collins (lifeless)]

@jelmer is this still in-progress, or actually done?

[Jelmer Vernooij (jelmer)]

This is waiting for a new bzr-builder to be deployed on the builders. RT: #46345

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

The new bzr and bzr-builder are now deployed so this should be fixed.