A more Ubuntu-friendly piuparts

I’ve just uploaded piuparts 0.35ubuntu1, this version fixes some of the issues which prevented its use out of the box.

What is piuparts?
Quoting from pacakge description:

piuparts tests that .deb packages handle installation, upgrading, and removal correctly. It does this by creating a minimal Debian installation in a chroot, and installing, upgrading, and removing packages in that environment, and comparing the state of the directory tree before and after. piuparts reports any files that have been added, removed, or modified during this process. . piuparts is meant as a quality assurance tool for people who create .deb packages to test them before they upload them to the package archive.

Issues and workarounds
I noticed several packages were purged incorrectly by debfoster, this caused tons of false positives and compromised the usage of this powerful tool. I adjusted one of debfoster options, MaxPriority, to remove packages whose priority is lower than important. Original setting was to exclude required packages only, but debfoster seems buggy and tries to remove needed packages (coreutils, sysv-rc and others). I’ll have a deeper look at it.

OTOH, Bug #317721 is still open, help is appreciated

How can I use it with my Ubuntu/Debian activities?
Have a look at Lars Wirzenius’s session taken during latest Ubuntu Developer Week.

Cool! I want to contribute to it!
http://wiki.debian.org/piuparts

devscripts and no-change rebuilds

Yesterday, Bryce sponsored my upload of devscripts 2.10.39ubuntu3 which implements correct mangling of debian/changelog while doing Ubuntu’s no-change rebuilds.

It happens developers have to upload a no-change rebuild (i.e. to clear NBS packages), they have to adjust changelog entry to reflect it’s a no-change upload by appending a “buildX” string to Debian version field instead of the stock “ubuntuX” one. Now it’s just a matter of launching dch –rebuild (or simply dch -R) to have the correct version number.

Patch can be found here, please notify me in case of mistakes. I hope it can be useful for you too