[Python-Dev] do people use sys._mercurial?

[Nick Coghlan]

On 25 January 2016 at 03:40, francismb <francismb at email.de> wrote:
> On 01/24/2016 01:17 PM, Nick Coghlan wrote:
>> Linux distros tend to build Python from a tarball rather than a source
>> checkout, for example, which means the build directory doesn't include
>> any VCS details:
> Does that helps traceability (reproducibility)? If distros use (?) the
> tarball from the release why it doesn't have, at least, the information
> from where that tarball was generated from (the check out point) ?

The main reason is that distro packaging processes long predate
Subversion's popularisation of atomic commits in open source version
control tools, and are designed to cope with release processes that
involve uploading a source tarball to a web server, so they don't
assume VCS tags or revision IDs will be available.

However, distro processes also capture the source code itself, and
often apply additional distro-specific patches, at which point
claiming to correspond directly to any given upstream commit would be
inaccurate.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia