Use of the XS-Vcs-bzr (or -git, ...) debian/control field

[Colin Watson]

On Thu, Mar 01, 2007 at 11:02:10PM +0100, Michael Vogt wrote:
> I would like to start a discussion about adopting the XS-Vcs-*
> debian/control field in our packages. The value of the field should be
> the location of the version control system used to maintain this
> packages, e.g. XS-Vcs-Bzr:
> http://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-core-dev/python-apt/ubuntu 

(I think that should be bazaar.launchpad.net, not just launchpad.net.)

I generally agree that using XS-Vcs-* is a good thing (and just added it
to ubiquity, casper, and usplash), even without any integration from
other tools; the ability to grep for it when e.g. doing automatic
changes to large numbers of packages is a useful gain in itself.

The main question I have is: what should be done with packages that
already have an XS-Vcs-* field from Debian? For example, the installer
uses XS-Vcs-Svn extensively, but I would like to add XS-Vcs-Bzr. Aside
from the fact that having both simultaneously would be ambiguous and
confusing, there's a possibility that both Debian and Ubuntu are using a
bzr branch. I'd suggest XS-Original-Vcs-* except I never did figure out
why we used Original rather than Debian there, and it's even more likely
that Ubuntu derivatives will want to change XS-Vcs-* than Maintainer,
given our goals for bzr integration. Can I suggest that we standardise
on renaming any existing XS-Vcs-* field to XS-Debian-Vcs-*?

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]