.changes from dpkg-genchanges 1.19.3 are rejected

[Mattia Rizzolo]

Today I tried uploading a package to launchpad, and it was rejected with:

Rejected:
Unable to find mandatory field 'Binary' in the changes file.
Further error processing not possible because of a critical previous error.

This is due to this change in dpkg:

   * dpkg-genchanges: Only reference binary packages being uploaded, which
     means that for a source-only upload, the Binary and Description fields
     should be empty. Closes: #818618

http://bugs.debian.org/818618 has more details on what happened.

[Olly Betts (ojwb)]

I just hit this too.

It'd be good to address this in launchpad, but meanwhile I found a simple (though nasty) way to work around this PPA upload check when using dpkg 1.19.3 or newer. Passing -DBinary=dummy to dpkg-genchanges (or --changes-option=-DBinary=dummy to dpkg-buildpackage) results in a *_source.changes containing "Binary: dummy" which passes the PPA upload check and the package then builds successfully, giving the binary packages it should (the contents of this header doesn't seem to need to match the packages which actually get built).

[Tehnick (tehnick)]

> or --changes-option=-DBinary=dummy to dpkg-buildpackage

Thanks a lot for your comment! This workaround works fine with debuild too.

[Launchpad QA Bot (lpqabot)]

Fixed in stable r18881 <http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~launchpad-pqm/launchpad/stable/revision/18881>.