git as a source package format?

[Daniel Pocock <daniel@pocock.com.au>]

Just following up on the earlier discussion about VCS (not just git) in
the packaging workflow

Would there be any hard objection to a source package format based on
git-bundle?

In other words, dpkg-source would extract all repository history (or all
of the branch used to build the package) using the git-bundle command.
The bundle file would then be uploaded to the FTP server instead of a
traditional source tarball.

A slight variation of this idea is that the repository would be cloned
into a temporary bare repo, and that bare repo would be tarred up and
the tarball would become the source upload.

Some of the problems I see with this:

- much harder to scan the whole history of the repo for non-DFSG content

- more disk space is used

The benefit is that we are distributing something much more useful than
a tarball snapshot of each upstream.  Running `apt-get source' will
retrieve a VCS and a user can immediately start patching it or even
developing a local branch.

Then again, some of that behavior could be achieved by creating an
`apt-get vcs-clone' function to read the Vcs control fields and make a
clone for a traditional source package's repo.