Re: More Vcs-Fields in debian/control?
Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org> writes:
> Evgeni Golov wrote:
>> We (lindi, liw and me) had just a short discussion in #-devel, that it
>> would be nice to have some sort of Vcs-Upstream-* in debian/control, to
>> be able to get to upstreams vcs history if it is not imported in
>> debian's vcs (which is often the case when using svn-bp or git-bf with
>> import-orig). [background: lindi is doing some git-copyright checks and
>> it fails heavily if there is no upstream history as the debian
>> maintainer is asumed to be the copyright holder for everything]
> I would instead suggest we deprecate packages not including upstream
> source in their VCS. The weight of progress is against that practice;
> tools have improved so there is little excuse to do it, it increasingly
> violates expections and makes things harder.
While I agree with this, I think the problem that they're trying to solve
is getting the upstream revision history, not just a copy of the source.
The Debian repository may contain only snapshots of releases imported via
git-import-orig or the like, rather than the complete revision history.
Having the complete revision history is definitely nice, and I've started
doing that with a few upstreams that use Git, but it's a bit more
complicated to get the details sorted out. If upstream is using something
like Subversion or CVS, it's even more complicated, although there are
some Git tools that mostly work (at least for Subversion; CVS is another
matter). If upstream is using some other weird thing like bzr or
Mercurial or whatnot, we're now getting into rather more effort than I'd
personally want to bother with.
So I can still see the point of somewhere adding a pointer to the upstream
VCS repository.
However, is the control file really the right place for that? I guess we
don't have a better place right now, but this doesn't feel like package
metadata that needs to be put into the Sources file.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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