Dear dpkg maintainer,

currently files under /etc/dpkg/origin/ are used to store information
about the distro vendor, for example its homepage or the URL of the bug
tracker.

It doesn't make sense for this information to be configurable by the end
user. This information should thus be read from from `/usr` (for example
`/usr/share/dpkg/origins/`) instead of `/etc/dpkg/origins/`. (Or in
addition to, using the classic stateless logic.)

This would also remove the need to ship an additional needless conffile
in `base-files` (`/usr/share/dpkg/origins/debian` would then be shipped
as a normal package file).

Regards,

Control: reassign -1 dpkg-dev
Control: retitle -1 dpkg-vendor: Support reading vendor info from /usr
Control: severity -1 wishlist
Control: block -1 by 695781

While storing the origins or vendor information under /etc was
probably a mistake at the time it got introduced, the problem now is
that the pathname is part of its interface. And that interface in
addition to the environment variables and the programmatic ones assume
there's only a single pathname providing that information.

This is compounded by the fact that the current origins or vendor
information and structure might not be sufficient to describe all
existing derivative practices, so before embarking on moving files
around and all the breakage that would cause, this would need time
spent on considering such cases to potentially handle all this in
one go. For example see #695781.

While the previous makes sense, I do not consider a conffile by itself
being problematic TBH.

Thanks,
Guillem