#1141065 lintian: incorrectly complains about adopted-extended-field for derivatives (XS-Debian-Vcs-Browser, XS-Debian-Vcs-Git, XSBC-Original-Maintainer)

Package:
lintian
Source:
lintian
Submitter:
Arnaud Rebillout
Date:
2026-06-29 08:23:02 UTC
Severity:
normal
#1141065#5
Date:
2026-06-29 08:21:42 UTC
From:
To:
Dear Maintainer,

For as long as I've been a Kali Linux maintainer (so that's 5 years
now), I've been used to see (and to ignore) these Lintian warnings:

```
I: base-files source: adopted-extended-field (in section for source) XS-Debian-Vcs-Browser [debian/control:12]
I: base-files source: adopted-extended-field (in section for source) XS-Debian-Vcs-Git [debian/control:11]
I: base-files source: adopted-extended-field (in section for source) XSBC-Original-Maintainer [debian/control:4]
```

For background, these fields are commonly used in Debian derivatives, we
use it to keep track of the original values. You might want to refer to
Lintian commits:
* aeea7148d5f3ea18f449cbb05bde8d982e6698ff
* 754d945fb87feea18b6d12c47e2ce280597dd9ac

I never understood why Lintian thinks those fields have been adopted
though. If I try to rename it to drop the XS- and XSBC- prefixes, then
it's dpkg-source that complains:

```
dpkg-source: warning: unknown information field 'Original-Maintainer' in input data in source package stanza of template control file
dpkg-source: warning: unknown information field 'Debian-Vcs-Git' in input data in source package stanza of template control file
dpkg-source: warning: unknown information field 'Debian-Vcs-Browser' in input data in source package stanza of template control file
```

I've seen this issue for so long, I wonder why nobody filed a bug report
yet, so maybe I'm missing something.

Best,

Arnaud