git at alioth is coming along very nicely and was a great step forward for Debian (thank you Ian).
What would be nice is a script e.g. called say "hegemon" which could be used to greate a Debian git repo farm locally. Why? Well, I hold that this would be preferable to adding sources to my Debian mirror - these days, who wants tar balls? Seriously, what you want is a source repo, with tags for the various releases of a package, so you can e.g. compare the current sid release with stable or testing, view the Debian specific patches, etc. This is what "sources" used to be used for. Nowadays sources is kinda moot. I note from here https://wiki.debian.org/Alioth/Git ^B https://wiki.debian.org/PackagingWithGit it says "If upstream is using git to manage their source, the debianization repository can live in a branch off of the main upstream tree. Clearly this can work only with some upstreams, but the big upside is that the relationship between the debianization and the upstream code is VERY clear." which is immediately followed with this "Since the Debian APT repositories still use tarballs you still have to manage those with this setup, but the pristine-tar exists for that purpose." There are possibly still advantages to tarballs, I don't know, since I haven't used one in something like a decade or more. Consistency of distribution of sources? Compliance with Debian packaging guidelines? Debian sources is currently a poor man's hegemon, providing little more than a point in time snapshot (which admittedly 'matches' (hopefully) the current respective binaries). The true hegemon (maniacal laughter echoes in the background) wants unified git repos, for every package. I imagine that some "canonical vcs" datum would need to be collected/ stored for each package, and hegemon would cycle through them running some default cmd like “git fetch” hegemon would also know to use git plugins to hungrily grab upstreams of other persuasions such as hg, bzr or (ughh! svn), for that equanimous local uniformity and hegemonic experience that we all crave so. Then, who would ever download 55GiBsMeDats again? Especially when a simple git clone /my/hegemon/p/package-source-repo /my/tmp/package-work-dir cd /my/tmp/package-work-dir git reset --hard v1.02 deb-buildpackage --pristine-tar will do that job? THEN, finally, a weekly hegemon build-tar git-deltas ^1week could be usefully generated and distributed (and downloaded and applied to local hegemon repo farms, by those who would otherwise be updating their debian source repos) and might ultimately supplant the tar source distribution. …
