[pkg-go] [uscan] git mode: allow for scanning repositories without tags

[Alexandre Viau]

Package: devscripts
Version: 2.15.10
Severity: wishlist
Usertags: uscan

In the Go Packaging Team[1], we face the issue that the Golang community
does not tag releases for library packages. This practice is encouraged
by the golang tools and by the community. Whether that is a good thing
or not is the subject of a broader discussion.

When used with git mode, I would like for uscan to generate a version
number even though the repository is not tagged.

One of our tools, dh-make-golang, is able to do this. For example:
"0.0~git20151028.0.2a60fc2-1":

 - 0.0 is the latest tag. If there are no tags found, 0.0 is the default.
 - git20151028 represents the date of the last commit
 - 0 represents the number of commits that day (counting from 0)
 - 2a60fc2 is the commit id

It does not have to be this exact versioning scheme, others can work too.

I have done a quick research and it looks like this can be done with a
combination of git ls-remote, downloading the last object, and parsing
it for the date.

This would help us a great deal to keep up with our packages, and would
surely be useful for other teams/packages.

This was discussed in dh-make-golang's issue tracker (adding Michael to
CC as he has expressed a friend of his would like to code this):
 - https://github.com/Debian/dh-make-golang/issues/8

[1]:
https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-go-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org

Cheers,

-- 
Alexandre Viau
aviau at debian.org

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