Re: `Every package must have exactly one maintainer'
On Tue, 14 Apr 1998, Joey Hess wrote:
> James Troup wrote:
> > It comes down to this: there are currently two packages in the
> > distribution which are maintainer by multiple maintainers: dpkg and
> > boot-floppies.
>
> Isn't lintian another example? I can't tell for sure becuase I cannot read
> master:/debian/home/schwarz/.qmail-lintian-maint , but I think mail to
> lintian-maint@debian.org goes to both Christoph and Richard. Even if it
> doesn't, they do communicate back and forth about lintain issues and share
> the work of coding it.
>
> If that's true, it's strange to see Christian on the other side of this
> argument.
No, it's not that strange. If you checked out my arguments carefully
you've noticed, that I'm *not* against the `several developers working on
a package' idea.
Take Lintian as example: In my view, Lintian has a very good design--this
is a result from an excellent cooperation between Richard and myself. With
we both contributed ideas, we've had _lots_ of discussions, and we both
wrote code for it.
However, we've decided to choose one _maintainer_ at a time (currently,
that's me--but Richard could take over at any time). This maintainer
integrates all changes/patches and makes releases of the package. As
Lintian is very popular these days, a lot of new ideas, patches, bug
reports, etc. are submitted. I'm sure the Lintian source code would get a
bit messy if we both would try to make changes at the same time. This job
of `release integration' has to be done by a single person.
Note, that the Linux kernel is developed by the same procedure: A lot of
programmers contribute source code, but everything is integrated by a
single person (Linus). The same holds for Emacs--and probably for most
other packages too.
The reason why I object to the `multi-maintainer' idea is my experience
with software development: I haven't seen a _working_ example of a
software program yet, which had multiple _release integrators_ (that's
what I think the `Maintainer:'s job is) at the same time. If someone would
show me a good example for this, maybe I'd change my mind.
The Lintian package has the following Maintainer field:
Maintainer: Christian Schwarz <lintian-maint@debian.org>
This makes it very clear that the package is maintained by a single person
(me), but the email address is a mail aliases for Richard and myself. This
has the advantage, that bug reports are sent to both of us--and most users
use this address for sending us feedback. I'd propose that other
`multi-maintainer' packages use the same format for the Maintainer field
(e.g., dpkg and boot-floppies).
Thanks,
Chris
-- Christian Schwarz
schwarz@monet.m.isar.de, schwarz@schwarz-online.com,
Don't know Perl? schwarz@debian.org, schwarz@mathematik.tu-muenchen.de
Visit PGP-fp: 8F 61 EB 6D CF 23 CA D7 34 05 14 5C C8 DC 22 BA
http://www.perl.com http://fatman.mathematik.tu-muenchen.de/~schwarz/
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