Releases and SnapshotsWhen branching and merging frequently, the different Debian changelog
entries on the different branches tend to get into the way of the automatic
merge and the the merge fails - leaving the (patholigical) merge to the
committer. In order to avoid this &git-dch; offers a way for creating
changelog entries from &git; commits before doing a
release or anytime between releases.
The simplest way is doing all the changes to the
without touching
debian/changelog at all. Then, when done, do:
&git-dch;
This will look up the latest released version in the changelog,
increment the version in the &debian; changelog, generate changelog
messages from the corresponding &git; commit id up to the branch head and
finally spawns an editor for final changelog file editing by invoking &dch;
.
But what if you want to have an (unreleased) snapshot for intermediate testing:
&git-dch;
will generate a snapshot release with a specially crafted version number
and a warning in the changelog that this is a snapshort release:
git-buildpackage (0.3.7~1.gbp470ce2) UNRELEASED; urgency=low
** SNAPSHOT build @470ce29ec7877705c844474a2fd89869aea0406d **
* add support for automatic snapshot
During subsequent calls with this version
number will continue to increase. Since the snapshot banners contains the
commit id of the current branch head, &git-dch; can figure out what to
append to the changelog by itself:
&git-dch;
will fetch the commit id and add changelog entries from that point to the
current HEAD - again auto incrementing the version number. If you don't want
to start at that commit id, you can specify any id or tag with:
&git-dch; =e76a6a180a57701ae4ae381f74523cacb3152780
After testing you can remove the snapshot header by a final &git-dch; call:
&git-dch; =HEAD
This will add no further entries but simply remove the specially crafted
version number and the snapshort header. Again you can use any commit id
or tag instead of if you want to add further changelog
entries - or you can (of course) use again.
Customizing snapshot numbersIf the auto incrementing of the snapshot number doesn't suite you needs you
can give any python expression that evaluates to a positive integer to
calculate the new snapshot number:
&git-dch; =1
&git-dch; ='snapshot + 2'
&git-dch; ='os.popen("git-log --pretty=oneline | wc -l").readlines()[0]'
&git-dch; =`git-log --pretty=oneline debian/0.3.3 | wc -l`
You can also add the snapshot-number calculation to gbp.conf:
[DEFAULT]
snapshot-number = os.popen("git-log --pretty=oneline | wc -l").readlines()[0]