Stability of part of Dpkg::Vendor

[Niels Thykier <niels@thykier.net>]

Hey

As the subject suggests; I would like to use a part of the Dpkg::Vendor
API instead of dpkg-vendor.
  As you may know I in the process of adding "Vendor Customization" for
Lintian[1] and for that we recently decided to use dpkg-vendor in
Lintian to determine the best profile for the current vendor.

Nevertheless, dpkg-vendor is in the dpkg-dev package and that undermines
our work on #626476 (reducing dpkg-dev to a suggests).  So if we could
use Dpkg::Vendor as fall-back in the absence of dpkg-vendor that would
be really great.
  We use two dpkg-vendor queries:

  dpkg-vendor --query Vendor

 - and -

  dpkg-vendor --vendor <$vendor> --query Parent

On a slightly related note: we assume that a given vendor can only have
one "Parent".  This is based on the code in dpkg-vendor which seems to
imply this is the case (the 'derives-from' action).
  If this assertion does not hold, please let me know so I can correct it.

~Niels

PS: Please CC me in replies.

[1] http://wiki.debian.org/Lintian/Spec/VendorCustomization