Re: Recording VCS information in the source package info

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

James Westby wrote:
> On Tue, 16 Feb 2010 15:21:19 -0600, Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> wrote:

> > People could get the information you want by looking at the
> > appropriate tag in the repository pointed to by Vcs-foo.
> 
> Except that as I said, you don't know that the tag in Vcs-foo was what
> was actually used to build the source package you have.

Okay, let me see if I understand:

 - The main user of this information would be the archive infrastructure;
 - The idea is to confirm that for each submitted binary package, the
   corresponding source is available;
 - For each binary package, this field identifies the corresponding
   source.

Okay, makes sense.  This is not convoluted at all, and I think the
control file would be the right place for it.

But especially because of this point:

> However, often people will repeatedly test build their uncommited
> changes, then when they are happy commit and upload the package that was
> already built. In order that we can not be fooled by this we would want
> the dirty flag. In order to notice that the revision that was pushed
> differs to what was built but has the same contents then we want the
> hash.

What you are describing does not have as much to do with the Vcs-foo
repository as I was imagining.  What you need is a hash of the source
tree used to build the package; the history is not at all relevant,
and in fact you would want to ignore it.  The main thing this has to
do with version control systems is that each one has its own format
for the hash of a file system tree, I guess.

With some existing packages, the full source in the form that gets
uploaded is not actually in the source repository at all.  For
example, in a package I maintain, to build from a checkout you have to
run debian/autogen.sh first to generate a debian/changelog.upstream
file from the version control log.

To work with archive infrastructure of the kind you describe, I would
have to change my ways and check in the generated files, I guess.

Thanks for the food for thought,
Jonathan