ubuntu/debian repos (was: Suggested additions to the Hg online book)

[Ken Blake]

On Sun, Sep 28, 2008 at 1:05 PM, Benoit Boissinot <bboissin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 28, 2008 at 12:03 PM, Patrick Waugh <ptwaugh at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Also, how would I find out who maintains the Ubuntu Hg package currently?
>
> The ubuntu package is directly imported from Debian. So in some way there are
> no real ubuntu maintainer, all patches comes from Debian.
> If you want to change some stuff in the ubuntu package it might be wise to get
> in touch with the debian developper who maintains hg (Vincent Danjean).

I've been meaning to ask about why the Ubuntu hardy repo was so out of
date.  It currently
has v0.9.5.  I googled Vincent and found this page:
http://www-id.imag.fr/Laboratoire/Membres/Danjean_Vincent/deb.html#mercurial
which shows the package name to be mercurial_1.0-7~bpo40+1_i386.deb which I
assume means it is version 1.0.  But when I look at the Debian site:
http://packages.debian.org/etch/mercurial it lists mercurial
(0.9.1-1+etch1) which
implies an even older version than Ubuntu.  So my interpretation of
this is Ubuntu and
Debian are not in sync and Vincent has done an upgrade but it hasn't
been accepted yet?
I don't really know how these things work.

Also, mercurial is in the universe repo whereas git, bzr and in the
main repo.  Is this
strictly a Ubuntu thing?  And if so how (or who) decides which repo a
package goes into?

Ken