Comment 1 for bug 783122

On Sun, 2011-05-15 at 17:44 +0000, Max Bowsher wrote:
> In bzr-builddeb 2.7.4, the invocation of dch during merge-upstream was
> changed to include the --package option. (See bug 385667). The
> combination of options -v and --package without --create was not allowed
> by dch until devscripts 2.10.59.
>
> This means the merge-upstream operation is no longer usable on <= lenny,
> <= karmic.
>
> Most likely we should just not specify --package unless alternatively
> specifying --create.
>
> Alternatively, if there's a desire to have bzr-builddeb pass --package
> to dch to support changing the source package name via "bzr merge-
> upstream --package newpackagename" in an existing package branch (seems
> slightly far-fetched), then bzr-builddeb should express a dependency on
> devscripts (>= 2.10.59~)
Requiring a newer devscripts seems reasonable to me. As we discussed
here in person at the sprint:

 * karmic is EOL
 * nobody has backported bzr-builddeb to lenny yet; backporting it now
wouldn't be significantly harder, it would just require backporting
devscripts too
 * packagers probably shouldn't be using karmic/lenny anyway, even if
they want to build for older releases

Cheers,

Jelmer