In the project I'm in we build debian packages to distribute our software. The changelog is edited by a couple of committers and tends to be invalid.
Is there a way to check if the changelog is valid without the need to run a full "debuild"?
dch is a tool for editing changelogs. It will complain if the changelog is invalid I believe. (You could also encourage the other committers to use this to avoid the problem in the first place!)
dpkg-source reads the changelog file when building the source. That would make quite a reasonable "sanity" check, but doesn't do a full build.