Changelog

debian/changelog — dpkg source packages’ changelog file — list of entries in reversed chronological order.

Must be encoded in UTF-8.

Entry

package (version) distributions; metadata

  * change-details
    more-change-details

  * even-more-change-details

 -- maintainer-name <email>  date

• package — package name;
• version — package version number;
• distributions — space-separated list of distributions where this package should be installed;
• metadata — comma-separated list of key=value items:
  • urgency — for Urgency field in .changes file;
  • binary-only — with a yes value denotes a binary-only upload (see man);
• change-details — change description;
  • must start with at least 2 spaces;
  • should have an asterisk after spaces for every change (by convention);
  • may be separated by blank lines;
  • if bug was resolved description may contain text according regexp /closes:\s*(?:bug)?\#?\s?\d+(?:,\s*(?:bug)?\#?\s?\d+)*/i{.perl};
• maintainer and email — name and email of a maintainer who made this change;
  • this line must start with exactly 1 space;
• date — date and time this change was made;
  • must be separated from maintainer and email by exactly 2 spaces;
  • format see below.

Date

• Format: day-of-week, dd month yyyy hh:mm:ss +zzzz.
• strftime format: "%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %z" (with LC_TIME=C).

Perl

 1#!/usr/bin/env perl
 2use strict;
 3use warnings;
 4use feature qw(say);
 5use locale;
 6use POSIX qw(locale_h);
 7use Time::Piece;
 8
 9setlocale(LC_TIME, 'C');
10my $date = localtime->strftime('%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %z');
11say($date);

Shell

1LANG=C date -R

See Also

• deb-changelog(5)