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NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | FILES | EXAMPLES | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON |
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deb-changelog(5) dpkg suite deb-changelog(5)
deb-changelog - dpkg source packages' changelog file format
debian/changelog
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.
debian/changelog
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
deb822(5), deb-changes(5), deb-version(7), dpkg-parsechangelog(1).
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 2025-08-11. (At
that time, the date of the most recent commit that was found in
the repository was 2025-08-06.) 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
1.22.19-74-gf1ca0 2025-05-18 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)
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HTML rendering created 2025-09-06 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depth Linux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, look here. Hosting by jambit GmbH. |
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