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Manpage of DEBCHANGE

DEBCHANGE

Section: User Commands (1)
Updated: Debian Utilities
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NAME

debchange - Tool for maintenance of the debian/changelog file in a source package  

SYNOPSIS

debchange [options] [text ...]
dch [options] [text ...]  

DESCRIPTION

debchange or its alias dch will add a new comment line to the Debian changelog in the current source tree. This command must be run from withing that tree. If the text of the change is given on the commandline, debchange will run in batch mode and simply add the text, with line breaks as necessary, at the appropriate place in debian/changelog. If no text is specified then debchange will run the editor as determined by sensible-editor for you to edit the file. (The environment variables VISUAL and EDITOR are used in this order to determine which editor to use.) Editors which understand the +n option for starting the editing on a specified line will use this to move to the correct line of the file for editing. If the editor is quit without modifying the temporary file, debchange will exit without touching the existing changelog.

At most one of --append, --increment and --newversion may be specified as listed below. If no options are specified, dch will look for an appropriate dupload(1) or dput(1) log file in the parent directory to determine whether this version of the package has been uploaded successfully. It will behave as if --increment had been specified if a successful upload has been logged and as if --append had been specified otherwise. A warning will be issued if the log file is found but a successful upload is not recorded. This may be because the previous upload was performed with a version of dupload prior to 2.1 or because the upload failed.

If the directory name of the source tree has the form package-version, then debchange will also attempt to rename it if the (upstream) version number changes. This can be prevented by using the --preserve command line or configuration file option as described below.  

OPTIONS

--increment, -i Increment either the Debian release number or, if this is a native Debian package, the version number. This creates a new section at the beginning of the changelog with appropriate headers and footers. Also, if this is a new version of a native Debian package, the directory name is changed to reflect this.
--append, -a
Add a new changelog entry at the end of the current version's entries.
--newversion version, -v version
This specifies the version number (including the Debian release part) explicitly and behaves as the --increment option in other respects. It will also change the directory name if the upstream version number has changed.
--fromdirname, -d
This will take the upstream version number from the directory name, which should be of the form package-version. If the upstream version number has increased from the most recent changelog entry, then a new entry will be made with version number version-1 (or version if the package is Debian native), with the same epoch as the previous package version. If the upstream version number is the same, this option will behave in the same way as -i.
--preserve, -p
Preserve the source tree directory name if the upstream version number (or the version number of a Debian native package) changes. See also the configuration variables section below.
--no-preserve
Do not preserve the source tree directory name (default).
--help, -h
Display a help message and exit successfully. (This will happen even if some other option is also specified.)
--version
Display version and copyright information and exit successfully.
 

CONFIGURATION VARIABLES

The two configuration files /etc/devscripts.conf and ~/.devscripts are sourced in that order to set configuration variables. Command line options can be used to override configuration file settings. Environment variable settings are ignored for this purpose. The currently recognised variable is:
DEBCHANGE_PRESERVE
If this is set to yes, then it is the same as the --preserve command line parameter being used.
 

ENVIRONMENT

DEBEMAIL, EMAIL
If either of these variables is set, it will be used as the maintainer/uploader's email address in any new changelog sections created. If both are set, DEBEMAIL will take precedence. If neither is set, the current user's email address (or, if that fails, the email in the first changelog entry currently present) will be used.
DEBFULLNAME
The maintainer/uploader's full name to be used in new changelog sections. If unset, the name specified in the passwd file or, if there is none, the name of the maintainer in the first changelog entry currently present will be used.
VISUAL, EDITOR
These environment variables (in this order) determine the editor used by sensible-editor.
 

SEE ALSO

debclean(1), dupload(1) dput(1) and debc(1).  

AUTHOR

The original author was Christoph Lameter <clameter@debian.org>. Many substantial changes and improvements were made by Julian Gilbey <jdg@debian.org>.


 

Index

NAME
SYNOPSIS
DESCRIPTION
OPTIONS
CONFIGURATION VARIABLES
ENVIRONMENT
SEE ALSO
AUTHOR

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Time: 10:35:00 GMT, March 29, 2024