Re: Reducing allowed Vcs for packaging?
On Sun, Feb 26, 2023 at 02:24:26PM +0100, Bastian Germann wrote:
> 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.
What about packages that don't use a Vcs today? There are far more of those today
than that are using non-standard Vcs repositories.
The number of packages that's using non-standards Vcs repositories is declining
gradually anyway (0.4% of the archive today). What does dropping the Vcs-* headers
achieve, besides making it even harder to work with these packages?
As somebody who uses Vcs-Bzr for some of the Bzr packages, I'd be on board
with mandating Git (because that gets us consistency in being able to work with
every package) - but I don't see the point of dropping support for other
Vcs-* headers without doing that.
Cheers,
Jelmer
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