deb-changelog(5) — Linux manual page

NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | FILES | EXAMPLES | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON

deb-changelog(5)               dpkg suite               deb-changelog(5)

NAME         top

       deb-changelog - dpkg source packages' changelog file format

SYNOPSIS         top

       debian/changelog

DESCRIPTION         top

       Changes in the packaged version of a project are explained in the
       changelog file debian/changelog.  This includes modifications
       made in the source package compared to the upstream one as well
       as other changes and updates to the package.

       The format of the debian/changelog allows the package building
       tools to discover which version of the package is being built and
       find out other release-specific information.

       That format is a series of entries like this:

        package (version) distributions; metadata
                 [optional blank line(s), stripped]
         * change-details
           more-change-details
                 [blank line(s), included in dpkg-parsechangelog(1)
       output]
         * even-more-change-details
                 [optional blank line(s), stripped]
         -- maintainer-name <email-address>  date

       package and version are the source package name and version
       number.  version is delimited by parenthesis U+00028 ‘(’ and
       U+0029 ‘)’.

       distributions lists one or more space-separated distributions
       where this version should be installed when it is uploaded; it is
       copied to the Distribution field in the .changes file.
       distributions must be terminated by a semicolon (U+003B ‘;’).

       metadata lists zero or more comma-separated keyword=value items.
       Each keyword can contain only minus and case insensitive
       alphanumeric characters, as they need to be mapped to deb822(5)
       field names.  The only keywords currently supported by dpkg are:

       urgency
           Its value is used for the Urgency field in the .changes file
           for the upload.

       binary-only
           With a yes value, it is used to denote that this changelog
           entry is for a binary-only non-maintainer upload (an
           automatic binary rebuild with the only change being the
           changelog entry).

       The change details may in fact be any series of lines starting
       with at least two spaces (U+0020 SPACE), but conventionally each
       change starts with an asterisk and a separating space and
       continuation lines are indented so as to bring them in line with
       the start of the text above.  Blank lines may be used here to
       separate groups of changes, if desired.

       If this upload resolves bugs recorded in the distribution bug
       tracking system, they may be automatically closed on the
       inclusion of this package into the distribution archive by
       including the string:

           Closes: #nnnnn

       in the change details, where #nnnnn is the bug number.  The exact
       Perl regular expression is:

           /closes:\s*(?:bug)?\#?\s?\d+(?:,\s*(?:bug)?\#?\s?\d+)*/i

       That is, the string should consist of the word closes: followed
       by a comma-separated list of bug numbers.  Bug numbers may be
       preceded by the word bug and/or a # sign, as in "Closes: 42,
       bug#43, #44, bug 45".  The words closes: and bug are not case
       sensitive.  The list of bug numbers may span multiple lines.

       This information is conveyed via the Closes field in the .changes
       file.  Where, depending on the archive maintenance software, all
       the bug numbers listed might get automatically closed.

       The maintainer name and email address used in the changelog
       should be the details of the person who prepared this release of
       the package.  They are not necessarily those of the uploader or
       usual package maintainer.  The information here will be copied to
       the Changed-By field in the .changes file, and then later might
       be used to send an acknowledgment when the upload has been
       installed in the distribution archive.

       The date has the following format (compatible and with the same
       semantics of RFC2822 and RFC5322, or what «date -R» generates):

           day-of-week, dd month yyyy hh:mm:ss +zzzz

       where:

       day-of-week
           Is one of: Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri, Sat, Sun.

       dd  Is a one- or two-digit day of the month (01-31), where the
           leading zero is optional, but conventionally does not get
           omitted.

       month
           Is one of: Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct,
           Nov, Dec.

       yyyy
           Is the four-digit year (e.g. 2010).

       hh  Is the two-digit hour (00-23).

       mm  Is the two-digit minutes (00-59).

       ss  Is the two-digit seconds (00-60).

       [+-]zzzz
           Is the time zone offset from Coordinated Universal Time
           (UTC).  ‘+’ indicates that the time is ahead of (i.e., east
           of) UTC and ‘-’ indicates that the time is behind (i.e., west
           of) UTC.  The first two digits indicate the hour difference
           from UTC and the last two digits indicate the number of
           additional minutes difference from UTC.  The last two digits
           must be in the range 00-59.

       The first “title” line with the package name must start at the
       left hand margin.  The “trailer” line with the maintainer and
       date details must be preceded by exactly one space (U+0020
       SPACE).  The maintainer details and the date must be separated by
       exactly two spaces (U+0020 SPACE).  Each part of the date can be
       separated by one or more spaces (U+0020 SPACE), except after the
       comma where it can be separated by zero or more spaces (U+0020
       SPACE).

       Any line that consists entirely (i.e., no leading whitespace) of
       # or /* */ style comments or RCS keywords.

       Vim modelines or Emacs local variables, and ancient changelog
       entries with other formats at the end of the file should be
       accepted and preserved on output, but their contents might be
       otherwise ignored and parsing stopped at that point.

       The entire changelog must be encoded in UTF-8.

FILES         top

       debian/changelog

EXAMPLES         top

        dpkg (1.17.18) unstable; urgency=low

         [ Guillem Jover ]
         * Handle empty minimum versions when initializing dependency versions,
           as the code is mapping the minimum version 0 to '' to avoid outputting
           useless versions. Regression introduced in dpkg 1.17.17. Closes: #764929

         [ Updated programs translations ]
         * Catalan (Guillem Jover).

         [ Updated dselect translations ]
         * Catalan (Guillem Jover).
         * German (Sven Joachim).

         -- Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org>  Sun, 12 Oct 2014 15:47:44 +0200

SEE ALSO         top

       deb822(5), deb-changes(5), deb-version(7),
       dpkg-parsechangelog(1).

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of the dpkg (Debian Package Manager) project.
       Information about the project can be found at 
       ⟨https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Dpkg/⟩.  If you have a bug report
       for this manual page, see
       ⟨http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?src=dpkg⟩.  This
       page was obtained from the project's upstream Git repository ⟨git
       clone https://git.dpkg.org/git/dpkg/dpkg.git⟩ on 2023-12-22.  (At
       that time, the date of the most recent commit that was found in
       the repository was 2023-12-18.)  If you discover any rendering
       problems in this HTML version of the page, or you believe there
       is a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or you have
       corrections or improvements to the information in this COLOPHON
       (which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail to
       man-pages@man7.org

1.22.0-52-g1af0                2023-08-30               deb-changelog(5)

Pages that refer to this page: dpkg-genchanges(1)dpkg-gencontrol(1)dpkg-parsechangelog(1)dpkg-source(1)deb-buildinfo(5)deb-changes(5)