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Re: XS-X-Vcs-XXX field not (yet) announced



On Fri, Sep 22, 2006 at 09:43:37PM +0200, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 22, 2006 at 02:21:22PM -0500, John Goerzen wrote:
> > I would also like to raise a question: does it make any sense to be able
> > to list two URLs, one for the Debian branch and one for the upstream
> > branch?
> 
> I've thought about similar issues. I made up my mind about these
> questions being in the wrong direction :)
> 
> My idea for this field it to give a pointer intended for human
> consumption. Once a user knows where to look, if he is willing to have
> access to the repo he is probably able to discover branches, tags, learn
> the repo layout and so on. If we agree on this idea I would answer no,
> it doesn't make sense to me.

That doesn't work so well for heavily distributed systems such as darcs.
In darcs, every repo is a branch, and every branch is a repo.  Every
repo represents exactly 1 branch.  Of course, branching is cheap, so
creating repos is also cheap.

A person may be able to discover an upstream repo by simply browsing to
a parent directory if the webserver is configured to simply show this.
On the other hand, when darcs is used upstream, it is quite likely that
the upstream repo doesn't even exist on the same server.  The package's
repo may not even have a link to the upstream repo.

Now, that may not be a big deal -- the person could presumably still
find out about the upstream repo from the upstream website.

Just a question.

-- John



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