#1114473 uscan: spurious warning on commented-out paragraph

Package:
devscripts
Source:
devscripts
Description:
scripts to make the life of a Debian Package maintainer easier
Submitter:
Julien Plissonneau Duquène
Date:
2026-02-20 12:27:02 UTC
Severity:
normal
#1114473#5
Date:
2025-09-05 20:21:25 UTC
From:
To:
Dear Maintainers,

uscan currently issues the following warning when a v5 d/watch file contains a
paragraph that is entirely commented out:

```
uscan warn: The following paragraph isn't well formatted, skipping it: <<
==EOF==
# Previously (before 1.2.0):
#Source: https://github.com/codehaus/jaxen/tags
#Dversion-Mangle: s/~beta/-beta-/
#Uversion-Mangle: s/_/./g"
#Matching-Pattern: .*/V_([\d_]+)_Final.tar.gz
==EOF==
```

Here are the contents of debian/watch:

```
Version: 5

Source: https://github.com/jaxen-xpath/jaxen.git
Matching-Pattern: refs/tags/v@ANY_VERSION@
Git-Mode: full
Mode: git

# Previously (before 1.2.0):
#Source: https://github.com/codehaus/jaxen/tags
#Dversion-Mangle: s/~beta/-beta-/
#Uversion-Mangle: s/_/./g"
#Matching-Pattern: .*/V_([\d_]+)_Final.tar.gz
```

I believe no warning should be emitted in such cases.

Best regards,
--- /etc/devscripts.conf ---
Empty.
--- ~/.devscripts --- Not present
#1114473#10
Date:
2026-02-20 12:23:39 UTC
From:
To:
Hi Yadd,

Have you seen #1114473 (and duplicate #1127829)? Seems watch file v5
does not properly disregard comments lines starting with a #.
According to the man page it should ignore them:

https://manpages.debian.org/unstable/devscripts/debian-watch.5.en.html

I also saw this in src:mariadb:

dpkg -l devscripts
ii  devscripts     2.26.5

uscan
uscan warn: The following paragraph isn't well formatted, skipping it:
<< ==EOF==
# String "-11.8." needs to be in path as MariaDB releases several series in
# parallel (e.g 11.4, 10.11, 10.4, 10.3 etc) and uscan should check for updates
# only in the 11.8-series.
#
# Specifically use archive.mariadb.org because it supports https and the main
# page has a file listing suitable for scanning new releases.
# The archive.mariadb.org service is under MariaDB Foundation control and is the
# official source for new releases.
==EOF==