Ubuntu Manpage: debcheckout - checkout the development repository of a Debian package

NAME

       debcheckout - checkout the development repository of a Debian package

SYNOPSIS

       debcheckout [OPTIONS] PACKAGE [DESTDIR]
       debcheckout [OPTIONS] REPOSITORY_URL [DESTDIR]
       debcheckout --help

DESCRIPTION

       debcheckout  retrieves  the  information about the Version Control System used to maintain a given Debian
       package (the PACKAGE argument), and then checks out the latest (potentially unreleased)  version  of  the
       package from its repository.  By default the repository is checked out to the PACKAGE directory; this can
       be overridden by providing the DESTDIR argument.

       The information about where the repository is available is expected to be found in Vcs-* fields available
       in  the  source  package  record. For example, the vim package exposes such information with a field like
       Vcs-Hg: http://hg.debian.org/hg/pkg-vim/vim, you can see it by grepping through apt-cache showsrc vim.

       If more than one source package record containing Vcs-* fields is available, debcheckout will select  the
       record  with  the highest version number.  Alternatively, a particular version may be selected from those
       available by specifying the package name as PACKAGE=VERSION.

       If you already know the URL of a given repository you can invoke debcheckout directly on it, but you will
       probably need to pass the appropriate -t flag.  That  is,  some  heuristics  are  in  use  to  guess  the
       repository type from the URL; if they fail, you might want to override the guessed type using -t.

       The currently supported version control systems are: Arch (arch), Bazaar (bzr), CVS (cvs), Darcs (darcs),
       Git (git), Mercurial (hg) and Subversion (svn).

OPTIONS

       GENERAL OPTIONS

       -a, --auth
           Work  in  authenticated  mode;  this  means  that  for  known  repositories  (mainly  those hosted on
           https://salsa.debian.org) URL rewriting  is  attempted  before  checking  out,  to  ensure  that  the
           repository  can  be  committed  to. For example, for Git repositories hosted on Salsa this means that
           git@salsa.debian.org:...git will be used instead of https://salsa.debian.org/...git.

           There are built-in rules for salsa.debian.org and github.com. Other hosts  can  be  configured  using
           DEBCHECKOUT_AUTH_URLS.

       -d, --details
           Only  print a list of detailed information about the package repository, without checking it out; the
           output format is a list of fields, each field being a pair of  TAB-separated  field  name  and  field
           value.  The  actual  fields  depend  on  the  repository  type.  This  action might require a network
           connection to the remote repository.

           Also see -p. This option and -p are mutually exclusive.

       -h, --help
           Print a detailed help message and exit.

       -p, --print
           Only print a summary about package repository information, without checking it out; the output format
           is TAB-separated with two fields: repository type, repository URL. This action works offline, it only
           uses "static" information as known by APT's cache.

           Also see -d. This option and -d are mutually exclusive.

       -P package, --package package
           When checking out a repository URL, instead of trying to guess the package name  from  the  URL,  use
           this package name.

       -t TYPE, --type TYPE
           Override  the  repository  type  (which  defaults  to some heuristics based on the URL or, in case of
           heuristic failure, the fallback "git"); should be one of the currently supported repository types.

       -u USERNAME, --user USERNAME
           Specify the login name to be used in authenticated mode (see -a). This option implies -a:  you  don't
           need to specify both.

       -f FILE, --file FILE
           Specify  that  the  named  file should be extracted from the repository and placed in the destination
           directory. May be used more than once to extract multiple files.

       --source=never|auto|download-only|always
           Some packages only place the debian directory in  version  control.   debcheckout  can  retrieve  the
           remaining parts of the source using apt-get source and move the files into the checkout.

           never
               Only use the repository.

           auto (default)
               If the repository only contains the debian directory, retrieve the source package, unpack it, and
               also place the .orig.tar.gz file into the current directory. Else, do nothing.

           download-only
               Always retrieve the .orig.tar.gz file, but do not unpack it.

           always
               Always  retrieve the .orig.tar.gz file, and if the repository only contains the debian directory,
               unpack it.

       VCS-SPECIFIC OPTIONS

       GIT-SPECIFIC OPTIONS

       --git-track BRANCHES
           Specify a list of remote branches which will be set up for tracking (as in git  branch  --track,  see
           git-branch(1))  after the remote Git repository has been cloned. The list should be given as a space-
           separated list of branch names.

           As a shorthand, the string "*" can be given to require tracking of all remote branches.

CONFIGURATION VARIABLES

The two configuration files /etc/devscripts.conf and ~/.devscripts are sourced by a shell in that order
to set configuration variables. Command line options can be used to override configuration file settings.
Environment variable settings are ignored for this purpose. The currently recognised variables are:

DEBCHECKOUT_AUTH_URLS
This variable should be a space separated list of Perl regular expressions and replacement texts,
which must come in pairs: REGEXP TEXT REGEXP TEXT ... and so on. Each pair denotes a substitution
which is applied to repository URLs if other built-in means of building URLs for authenticated mode
(see -a) have failed.

References to matching substrings in the replacement texts are allowed as usual in Perl by the means
of $1, $2, ... and so on.

This setting is used to configure the "authenticated mode" location for repositories. The Debian
repositories on salsa.debian.org are implicitly defined, as is github.com.

Here is a sample snippet suitable for the configuration files:

DEBCHECKOUT_AUTH_URLS='
^\w+://(svn\.example\.com)/(.*) svn+ssh://$1/srv/svn/$2
^\w+://(git\.example\.com)/(.*) git+ssh://$1/home/git/$2
'

Note that whitespace is not allowed in either regexps or replacement texts. Also, given that
configuration files are sourced by a shell, you probably want to use single quotes around the value
of this variable.

DEBCHECKOUT_SOURCE
This variable determines under what scenarios the associated orig.tar.gz for a package will be
downloaded. See the --source option for a description of the values.

DEBCHECKOUT_USER
This variable sets the username for authenticated mode. It can be overridden with the --user option.
Setting this variable does not imply the use of authenticated mode, it still has to be activated with
--auth.

AUTHOR