Upstream tarballs

When you are building a version of a package that uses a version of the upstream package that you have not used in a build before the upstream tarball for that version needs to be fetched from somewhere. It can be tedious to track the correct file down, download it and rename or repack it to have the correct name and be in the correct format.

To ease this step a bit the plugin will use uscan from the devscripts package to obtain the file for you if it needs it and your branch has a debian/watch file. The correct file will be downloaded if uscan can find it, and it will be renamed or repacked as necessary so that it can be used straight away for the build.

I also hope to extend this functionality to retrieve the tarball using apt if it is in the archive, and from a central location for those who work on packaging teams.