debmutate 0.75

manipulation of Debian package control files

Debmutate is a set of Python modules for manipulating the control files of Debian packages, with the ability to preserve the existing formatting of the control files.

It's built on top of the excellent python-debian library, and was originally extracted from lintian-brush.

To modify one of the control files, use one of the context managers to edit the file.

For example, for debian/control:

from debmutate.control import ControlEditor

with ControlEditor(path='debian/control') as control:
    print(control.source['Maintainer'])
    control.source['Maintainer'] = "Jelmer Vernooij <[e-mail]>"

Or for debian/changelog:

from debmutate.changelog import ChangelogEditor

with ChangelogEditor(path='debian/changelog') as editor:
   editor.add_entry(['Some entry'])

Once you leave the context manager, the changes will be written to disk if there were any. If the editor is unable to preserve the formatting of the control file, it will raise a FormattingUnpreservable error.

If the control file that was edited was generated from another control file (e.g. debian/control.in), debmutate will attempt to update that file instead and then regenerate debian/control. If it is unable to do so, it will raise a GeneratedFile exception.

The file will be left as-is if an exception is raised, or if the .cancel() method is called.

debmutate currently provides editors for the following control files:

• debian/changelog
• debian/copyright
• debian/control
• debian/patches/series
• debian/tests/control
• debian/watch
• debian/maintscripts, debian/*.maintscripts
• debian/source/lintian-overrides, debian/*.lintian-overrides
• debian/debcargo.toml