dh-elpa doesn't work on package versions with buildN or ubuntuN suffixes, errors
out with:

Invalid version syntax: ‘0.49build1’


patch at
http://launchpadlibrarian.net/562638722/dh-elpa_2.0.8_2.0.8ubuntu1.diff.gz

however the patch doesn't work yet, packages still ftbfs like
https://launchpadlibrarian.net/562650646/buildlog_ubuntu-impish-amd64.lbdb_0.49build1_BUILDING.txt.gz

any idea what's still missing?

Matthias Klose <doko@debian.org> writes:

OK, ftbfs is fixed, and I looked at it a bit more.

I think lbdb might just be a special case. It's a native package and
creates lbdb-pkg.el from debian/changelog via configure.  dh_elpa
assumes that if upstream provides a foo-pkg.el then it has legal
metadata in it; in this case that isn't the case.  I guess you could
patch configure.ac.

I don't know how much work would to defend against this kind of "wrong
input" in dh_elpa. The actual failure is in package-load-descriptor, a
standard emacs function, so some kind of preprocessing pass would be
needed. I don't know how many packages are affected by issue, it seems
to require native package.

cheers,

d