Lintian randomly reports trailing white space in debian/changelog. It would be desirable for debhelper to parse the file and strip traling white space whnever found.

- -- System Information:
Debian Release: bookworm/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (900, 'unstable')
Architecture: i386 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 5.10.0-21-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU threads)
Locale: LANG=fi_FI.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=fi_FI.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=fi:en
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: unable to detect

Versions of packages debhelper depends on:
ii  autotools-dev            20220109.1
ii  dh-autoreconf            20
ii  dh-strip-nondeterminism  1.13.1-1
ii  dpkg                     1.21.20
ii  dpkg-dev                 1.21.20
ii  dwz                      0.15-1
ii  file                     1:5.44-3
ii  libdebhelper-perl        13.11.4
ii  libdpkg-perl             1.21.20
ii  man-db                   2.11.2-1
ii  perl                     5.36.0-7
ii  po-debconf               1.0.21+nmu1

debhelper recommends no packages.

Versions of packages debhelper suggests:
ii  dh-make  2.202301

- -- no debconf information
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Hi,

Martin-Éric Racine wrote:

No. debhelper does not edit files which are checked by that check
(namely debian/changelog, debian/control and debian/rules).

Out of those, it could fix the debian/changelog file in the resulting
binary as it fiddles around with it already anyways. But it cannot fix
it in the source package. That's the maintainer's work.

Additionally that lintian check runs against the source package, not
the binary packages. So fixing it in the binary package via debhelper
won't make that emitted tag going away.

P.S.: If you're an Emacs user, just run "M-x wh-cl" when editing
debian/changelog and you're done.

		Regards, Axel

yup, I'd recommend to close this bug.

also we have the Debian janitor now, which fixes these things for you,
if you let them. :)

dh_installchangelogs could start by stripping trailing whitespace in
the source changelog and only then copy the file to the binary
targets.

In principle, "set trimblanks" in .nanorc accomplishes the same thing.
In practice, this only seems to work when lines are cut as the result
of text justification i.e. it doesn't trim trailing white space
unconditionally.

Martin-Éric

Nano has a similar option, but it only seems to take effect if a line
gets cut due to auto-formatting i.e. it's not enforced at every save
in a systematic way.

That only works for Git-maintained packages. For some packages,
Git-maintenance would be overkill.

Martin-Éric

... git maintenance should be mandatory.

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