Improvements to ‘debian/watch’ for fetching from VCS (was: This topic died off; any resolution?)

[Ben Finney <ben+debian@benfinney.id.au>]

Raphael Geissert <atomo64+debian@gmail.com> writes:

> I planned to add support for svn in version 4 watch files (it would
> be a matter of svn info svn://domain.tld/path/to/repo and some data
> massaging).
> 
> But well, now that everyone is talking about it why not just tell
> what is missing so that it can be addressed in version 4 watch
> files?

For my purposes, I would like to be able to specify “fetch from the
VCS at $URL, getting the specific working tree referenced by
identifier $ID” and then the rest of what uscan does for generating
an original source archive from the working tree.

That's made more complex, of course, by:

* the fact that the URL doesn't necessarily indicate what VCS tool is
  needed to interact with it (just about all of them allow an HTTP URL
  for public read-only access, so that's what will commonly be used
  here)

* the plethora of different concepts for mapping identifiers to
  specific working trees in different VCSen (revision-id and branches
  and tags, oh my!)

Ideally this would be predicated on the Final and Definitive Interface
to All VCSen Now and Future™, but I think that might be delayed by at
least a month or so.

-- 
 \       “I don't know anything about music. In my line you don't have |
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_o__)                                                                  |
Ben Finney