[DRE-maint] Moving away from uploaders.mk

[Lucas Nussbaum]

On 22/02/07 at 19:17 -0600, Gunnar Wolf wrote:
> [  back from VAC - That's why I'm resurrecting this old thread. I hope
>    I'm still in time to influence it ]
> 
> Lucas Nussbaum dijo [Fri, Feb 02, 2007 at 10:18:54PM +0100]:
> > I think that we should move away from the Uploaders rule. As discussed
> > in this thread in debian-devel[0], it is clearly not the best
> > organization. This scheme matches our organization the best:
> > 
> >  Maintainer: the main person responsible for the package
> >  Uploaders: team address + other members willing to help with this
> >     package
> 
> Yes... Shame, the pkg-ruby-extras way looked quite nice for me - In
> fact, I was pushing for pkg-perl to go that way [1] :)
> 
> Anwyay, I'd like to suggest pkg-perl's way: 'Maintainer' is not used
> to list an individual, but the group address. When a bug is reported
> against any pkg-perl maintained package, it gets sent to one of our
> mailing lists. Of course, I'm listed as the uploader for the packages
> I have touched and worked with.
> 
> Why putting team as the maintainer instead of as an uploader? First,
> because the team address is completely virtual - there is no single
> human behind it, and it just cannot ever produce an upload (or so I
> hope, at least ;-) ). Second, because the very essence of team
> maintainership is to kill feuds, to undo the "this is mine precious
> package" culture. Any team member is welcome to work on any of the
> packages - Of course, inside the team and as an inter-human thing, we
> can split responsabilities and keep track of who's the guy who cares
> about libfoo-ruby... But the package metadata does not need to reflect
> it. 

Well, the fact that we have a "mainly responsible person" as the
Maintainer doesn't prevent others from contributing to the package.
And anyone listing himself as Uploader should feel as responsible as the
Maintainer for that package.

Of course, any team member is welcomed to help with any team package,
but having a real person behind the Maintainer helps to know who is the
contact point for that package. So it's easier to notice unmaintained
packages.

This doesn't mean that no package would have the team as maintainer,
only that packages with a mainly responsible person would. For other
packages, if nobody steps forward, it would still be possible to use the
team as Maintainer.

Regarding bugs being sent to the mailing list, it's possible to achieve
that easily using the PTS email interface:
http://www.debian.org/doc/developers-reference/ch-resources.en.html#s-pts-commands

If we reach a consensus on this, we could have a script to automatically
subscribe the team address to our packages.
-- 
| Lucas Nussbaum
| lucas at lucas-nussbaum.net   http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/ |
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