Russ Allbery wrote: > Bernd Zeimetz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > Which will only give useful results if we have a central repository for > > all packages. If $RANDOM maintainer uses his own machine to host a > > repository and goes MIA, you'll be left with one large and messy patch > > as you don't have access to the maintainer's repository. While using a > > RCS is not a bad idea, maintainers would need to be forced to use alioth > > - that's nothing you can force people to easily. A proper collection of > > patches - including descriptions - is the best way at the moment. > > The long-term possibility, which I think Ian may be alluding to without > saying directly, is that some people are working on being able to ship the > repository with the source package. If you're using something like bzr or > git, you can then immediately start using regular VCS tools on the source > package and the right thing will happen.
I hope he was, and I hope this happens. (And my dpkg branch implementing it for git is still out there...) However, out of all the packages with Vcs-* fields, only about 400 (20%) don't use alioth. If maintainers going MIA and taking their version control repos with them becomes a problem, we could proactively mirror those onto alioth. A mirror that only ran when a new version of a package was uploaded shouldn't generate too bad load, especially for the ones already using distributed systems. -- see shy jo
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