Comment 4 for bug 788349

On Tue, 07 Jun 2011 13:33:50 -0000, Jelmer Vernooij <email address hidden> wrote:
> > So it looks like --package-merge is doing what I want, but I'm curious. Why
> > is it not possible to reliably detect this? Does it make sense to always
> > provide --package-merge or will that do bad things in some cases?
> My guess is that perhaps it doesn't work properly if there are a few
> entries in a Debian package that have not been uploaded (e.g. new
> upstream releases for which a changelog entry exists).

The case I think I had in mind was Debian merging from Ubuntu (including
changelog), Ubuntu syncing, and then Ubuntu going to make a change. The
changelog would be

  1-2 unstable
  1-1ubuntu1 oneiric

--package-merge would then see this as Ubuntu merging from Debian and
  add the wrong -v.

There are probably other situations you can point to.

Of course the failure mode is never really that bad.

Perhaps by looking at tags on mainline revisions as well we could avoid
e.g the case that I describe, but I don't know if that will be fragile
given the sorts of things that people might do.

> Does --package-merge back off if -v was specified manually?

No, but it probably should.

Thanks,

James