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Re: Reducing allowed Vcs for packaging?



Hello,

On Sun 26 Feb 2023 at 02:24PM +01, Bastian Germann wrote:

> Hi!
>
> During the last weeks I had a look at the Vcs situation in Debian. Currently,
> there are eight possible systems allowed and one might specify several of them for
> one package. No package makes use of several Vcs references and frankly I do not
> see why this was supported in the first place.
>
> For the allowed systems the situation in unstable is the following:
> arch is used by 2 packages pointing to bad URLs: #1025510, 1025511.
> bzr is used by ~50 packages, half of which point to bad URLs.
> cvs is used by 3 packages, 2 of which point to bad URLs: #1031312, #1031313.
> svn is used by ~130 packages, many of which point to bad URLs.
> darcs, mtn, and hg are not used.
>
> We can see: The Vcs wars are over; with git there is a clear winner and in my
> opinion, we should remove the possibility to use most of them for package
> maintenance. It is one additional barrier to get into package maintenance and
> we should remove the barriers that are not necessary.
>
> I would like to suggest removing the possibility to specify several systems and
> removing all systems except bzr, svn, and git, while deprecating bzr and possibly svn.
> This means solving the four listed bugs and convincing the cvsd maintainer to
> switch or drop the Vcs-Cvs reference. Then, the Debian Developer's Reference
> should specify the changes in §6.2.5 and whatever parses Vcs-* in debian/control
> should be adapted to do the specified thing.
>
> Finally, we can drop the orphaned packages {cvs,mercurial}-buildpackage
> (see #1026433) and add deprecation notices in brz-debian and svn-buildpackage.

Why don't we just fix all those packacges, instead of changing any
documents?  Is there anyone who actually wants to introduce new packages
not using git?  I'm not so sure.

-- 
Sean Whitton

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