[Fedora-packaging] DRAFT: SourceURL addition/clarification - Git Hosting Services

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Fri, Jun 26, 2015 at 13:49:10 -0400,
  Rich Mattes <richmattes at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>The biggest complaint I have with this draft is that it introduces a
>lot of extra unnecessary work for packagers.  Anyone packaging
>software coming from a git repository first has to figure out if
>they're able to use tags or not, based on a very opaque criteria.  How
>do you know that a project is moving tags?  Can you audit it before
>you package it?  How much work does that take?  Further, once you do
>package something, how do you make sure that the tag you used in your
>source URL doesn't change?  Do you need to check your source checksum
>vs upstream when making point releases?  Or do you check it monthly or
>weekly?  Is there any way to automate this process for people that
>maintain a lot of packages?

Someone used to run something that would check that the files in packages' 
source urls were still fetchable and hadn't changed. I haven't seen a report 
from this process in a long time, so it might not be run any more.

As long as github is returning the same bits when it regenerates an archive 
file for the same tag (when the tag doesn't change) I think using tags 
in URLs is good enough. (Because in theory we can automate checking for 
changes without getting lots of false positives.) This appears to be how 
things work now.