Re: Recording VCS information in the source package info

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Hi again,

Jonathan Nieder wrote:

> The information about dirty trees would have to be put elsewhere,
> though.  Maybe a magic line in debian/README.source, or if necessary,
> maybe this information would need to be in control (forgive me, I
> don’t know what is necessary to make data accessible to the UDD).
> 
> Do you have example use cases for this data in mind?  I think that
> would be helpful for thinking about it without speculating too much.

To clarify: you did mention two use cases: one being to improve
debcheckout, the other checking the Vcs-* fields (if I understood
correctly).  I had forgotten about them because it is not clear to me
they need the dirty bit.

The first use case (debcheckout) cannot benefit in any obvious way
from knowledge of dirty trees.

For the second (Vcs-* checker), I guess it could bail out for dirty
trees.  Unfortunately, 'dirty' trees are pretty common when including
files generated for the source package but ignored by the VCS, e.g.
from autotools), so this checker would not work for a large number of
packages.  Maybe a horrible hack would help: check that very few files
were modified, or that all the files changed are in .<vcs>ignore, or
something like that.  Such a hack would not really benefit from a
'dirty' bit.

So I am interested but not yet convinced.

Hope that is clearer,
Jonathan