About a week ago, I extended vcswatch to also look at tags in git repositories.

Previously, it was solely paying attention to the version number in the top paragraph in debian/changelog, and would alert if that version didn't match the package version in Debian unstable or experimental. The idea is that "UNRELEASED" versions will keep nagging the maintainer (via DDPO) not to forget that some day this package needs an upload. This works for git, svn, bzr, hg, cvs, mtn, and darcs repositories (in decreasing order of actual usage numbers in Debian. I had actually tried to add arch support as well, but that VCS is so weird that it wasn't worth the trouble).

There are several shortcomings in that simple approach:

• Some packages update debian/changelog only at release time, e.g. auto-generated from the git changelog using git-dch
• Missing or misplaced release tags are not detected

The new mechanism fixes this for git repositories by also looking at the output of git describe --tags. If there are any commits since the last tag, and the vcswatch status according to debian/changelog would otherwise be "OK", a new status "COMMITS" is set. DDPO will report e.g. "1.4-1+2", to be read as "2 commits since the tag [debian/]1.4-1".

Of the 16644 packages using git in Debian, currently 7327 are "OK", 2649 are in the new "COMMITS" state, and 4227 are "NEW". 723 are "OLD" and 79 are "UNREL" which indicates that the package in Debian is ahead of the git repository. 1639 are in an ERROR state.

So far the new mechanism works for git only, but other VCSes could be added as well.