Comment 15 for bug 1752523

Hi Lukasz,

I agree that depending on someone setting it manually on the rules file is not optimal while way better than "unknown".

This is not really an issue right now: if you look at the rules file you will notice that 'uver' is used to set the 'srcdir', which would cause the package to FTBFS if set to the wrong version after an update.

So for Bionic this should be well enough.

While investigating this I noticed a couple change that will cause problems in the next package update for Cosmic.

Upstream had a bug [1] where the lshw.spec file would be out of the source tree, thus the sources in the orig tarball were expanded into that lshw-VERSION directory. This is no longer the case and now the sources are all expanded into the package root, so there is no need for the 'uver' variable.

Debian has already packaged a newer version [2] (tagged B.02.18.85) and removed the 'uver' variable.

Until now the upstream tarball used to include a lshw.spec file. That file was was generated when calling the "release" rule in lshw's Makefile to create such tarball. Unfortunately Debian's newer orig tarball seems to have been created differently. Without a generated lshw.spec file there's nothing in lshw source that contains a reference to lshw's version.

For now the only way I see to fetch a version is to use the one from the changelog entry, as in:
VERSION=$(dpkg-parsechangelog -SVersion)

Would that be acceptable for Cosmic? If so I will follow up on Debian to include this fix.

Regards,
Tiago

References:
[1] https://ezix.org/src/pkg/lshw/commit/4af2308ad459924e792f4a09a7374ebae0cde805
[2] https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/lshw