[Debichem-devel] Jalview status not reflected in Vcs - what about team maintenance

[Andreas Tille]

Hi Vincent,

currently I'm running a personal effort I call "debian/upstream file of
the day" which has the goal to add publication data in debian/upstream
files[1] to every scientific package (at least I hope to be able to went
through all packages in Debian Med scope).  You can see the effect of
this effort when for instance inspecting the biological task[2] which
has several "Please cite:" entries.  The idea is to provide a better
service to our users as well as strengthen the connection to upstream by
giving them proper credit.

When I stumbled about Jalview I noticed that at the Vcs location
mentioned in the debian/control file the status in SVN is behind the
uploaded version (it only mentiones

  jalview (2.7.dfsg-1) experimental; urgency=low

but uploaded is

  jalview (2.7.dfsg-2) unstable; urgency=low                                                                

).  I have no idea whether the location of the Vcs has changed or
whether you just forgot to commit the latest changes.  In any case
it would be very helpful to have this information consistent because
the Upstream Metadata Gatherer[1] tries to parse Vcs for new upstream
files (see attachment for a Jalview upstream file I would like you
to commit once you have fixed the SVN issue).

Moreover I wonder whether you might consider team maintenance.
Currently you decided to store the packaging in pkg-java repository.
This is fine regarding the language the program is written in and there
is no need to change this (at least I guess any DD has commit
permissions - if not there are probably enough members of the other
interested teams which are namely DebiChem and Debian Med members of
pkg-java).  However, I would like you to consider to use either

   Debichem Team <debichem-devel at lists.alioth.debian.org>  or
   Debian Med Packaging Team <debian-med-packaging at lists.alioth.debian.org>

as maintainer and yourself as "Uploaders" to enable others providing
easy commits (like for instance the debian/upstream file) or step in in
case of problems in case your might be on vaccation or whatever.  It has
proven to be a good idea to use team maintenance and in the Debian Med
team we even have developed a Group Policy[3] which describes in detail
the rules we try to follow.

What do you think?

Kind regards

        Andreas.


[1] http://wiki.debian.org/UpstreamMetadata
[2] http://debian-med.alioth.debian.org/tasks/bio
[3] http://debian-med.alioth.debian.org/docs/policy.html

-- 
http://fam-tille.de
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Reference:
  Author: Waterhouse, A.M. and Procter, J.B. and Martin, D.M.A and Clamp, M. and Barton, G. J.
  Title: "Jalview Version 2 - a multiple sequence alignment editor and analysis workbench"
  Journal: Bioinformatics
  Year: 2009
  Volume: 25
  Number: 9
  Pages: 1189-1191
  DOI: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btp033
  PMID: 19151095
  URL: http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/content/25/9/1189.abstract
  eprint: http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/content/25/9/1189.full.pdf+html