Executive Summary
This proposal is to add an informative comment to the Fedora spec files, of the form:
{{{
- VCS: <vcstype>:<vcsurl>
}}}
Example:
{{{
- VCS: git:git://git.gnome.org/metacity
}}}
Rationale
Currently spec files have a lot of metadata about the upstream project; however it lacks one of the most important, which is the upstream revision control system.
Adding this data will allow:
- Cherrypicking a patch directly from the upstream VCS
- Correspondence checking between source tarballs and VCS checkouts
- Automated build scripts to update the spec from VCS
- In the more distant future, reworking Fedora's packaging to be more VCS-centric (i.e. having a mirror of upstream VCS instead of series of inefficient tarball snapshots in lookaside cache)
Implementation
Because RPM only allows a well-known set of keys, this proposal introduces the key with a comment prefix, to ensure that older RPM versions do not complain. A patch has been [submitted upstream] however.
The key format has been influenced by the [Maven SCM format], however we drop the redundant "scm:" prefix.
Supported implementation formats:
git
The <vcsurl> part should be in a format which 'git clone as of Git 1.6.6 will accept, with the additional qualifier that the URL may have a fragment identifer which denotes a branch. Examples:
{{{
}}}