New features for debcheckout, ... now with TopGit support!

Today I've spent some time hacking on debcheckout,
which for weird reasons happens to be at the bottom of a stack of
chained things that I need to do in the forthcoming days. Also, I
had neglected debcheckout for a while, and the other
devscripts
folks where ready to shout at me because of that .

Well, it has been fun, and beside having fixed all the
outstanding bugs, debcheckout has grown some cute new
features:

• the ability to query a VCS repository (using
  -d/--details) for details, at the very
  minimum it will parse for you the Vcs-* fields, but it
  is expected that in the future will be able to be more telling, and
  it is already so for TopGit ...

• ... and speaking about that, debcheckout now has support
  for TopGit. In two ways: the first one is using
  -d, which will tell you whether a GIT repo is
  TopGit-enabled or not and, if it is so, also the list of
  available top-bases. For instance:

  zack@usha:~$ debcheckout -d topgit
type git
url git://git.debian.org/git/collab-maint/topgit.git
top-bases debian/locations
topgit yes


  or even more brutally

  zack@usha:~$ debcheckout -d git://git.debian.org/git/pkg-ocaml-maint/packages/ocaml-batteries.git
type git
url git://git.debian.org/git/pkg-ocaml-maint/packages/ocaml-batteries.git
top-bases features/flexi-build
topgit yes


  The other way in which TopGit is supported, is that when
  checking out a GIT repo which is detected to be TopGit's as well,
  population of top-bases (i.e., TopGit local
  initialization) is automatically performed.

  ... yes, a while ago I've fallen in love with TopGit, is it
  that evident?

• it is now possible to specify custom rules for
  authenticated mode, this way you can use -a
  also on packages not hosted on well known Debian/Ubuntu VCS
  servers

• finally, you can now ask debcheckout to
  automatically enable remote tracking of remote GIT
  branches, which is usually what a maintainer wants to do
  when doing a fresh checkout

Enjoy!

(ah, of course all this is not uploaded yet, but you can
grab a
preview from devscripts' VCS or, better, doing
debcheckout devscripts which is soooo bootstrapy.
SCNR.)