For -backports uploads, I normally prefer to retain only the
backports-specific changelog entry for the most recent round of
backports, in order to avoid cluttering the changelog with lots of
entries that just say "Rebuild for bookworm-backports".  I accept that
this may be a personal quirk, but
https://backports.debian.org/Contribute/#index3h2 seems to at least
suggest it, and I don't think it's terribly unusual.

However, this caused git-debpush to fail with "error: missing field
Version in parsed changelog".  I retried with "dgit -v0.11.1
push-source" and that worked fine, but git-debpush seems to have no
equivalent option.  Perhaps one could be added?

Thanks,

Hello,

We should definitely support not including the old backports entries as
lots of people do backports that way, and it's a reasonable workflow.

I think we should avoid burdening the user with having to pass a -v
option.  This should be handled automatically.

Ian, what about a more limited version of #1106266 that applies only to
certain suites where overwriting is normal, such as backports?

We discussed IRL the handling of backport and -v versions.

There are *two* things we are trying to do with the previous version
informatiion:

 * Calculate the -v option to pass to dpkg-parsechangelog.
   (With a normal upload this is the version currently present in the
   target suite.)

 * Perform the overwrkte check: we normally insist (with
   --trust-changelog eg in t2u) that the version currently present
   in the target suite, is mentioned in *this* upload's changelog.

Backports may be based on the previous backport (merge workflow) or
may be re-created afresh from the parent suite (restart workflow).

We think this can be supported with the following behavioural change
in dgit:

 * Backports suites are special (and known via the configuration).

 * When uploading to backports, check our changelog (of the thing
   we're uploading) for *either*
    - the current version in the parent suite
    - the current version in the backport suite

 * Whichever of these exists and is most recent in our changelog,
   should be used for dpkg-parsechangelog -v.  It should appear
   because otherwise we'll be failing the --trust-changelog check.

 * With --overwrite=SPECIFIC-VERSION, it is ok to specify either of
   those versions as SPECIFIC-VERSION.  We might the user (who isn't
   using t2u) to specify -v.

Ian.

I wrote:

We need to additionally check that the version we are uploading is
greater than (by version comparison) the version in backports.

Ian.