Re: Moving debootstrap to fully team maintained (drop Uploaders field)

[Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org>]

On Tue, Jul 18, 2023 at 09:49:34PM +0100, Luca Boccassi wrote:
> debootstrap's d/control lists the Maintainer as the "Debian Install
> System Team" - that is great. There are also 3 Uploaders listed: Colin
> Watson, Steve McIntyre and Hideki Yamane.
> 
> The last contribution and upload by Colin were in 2021 and 2015,
> respectively, by Steve was it was 2016 and 2017, and Hideki and 2021
> and 2020. Again, not a critique, just data!

I can't speak for others, but I don't object to being removed from
Uploaders here.

> So, I want to propose to move the package to exclusively team
> maintained, drop the Uploaders field, leave only the Maintainer field
> with the current team as-is, and ask anybody who wants to help maintain
> it to join the installer-team on Salsa and just send changes as MRs,
> help review/merge them, and do normal uploads, without marking them as
> NMU nor feeling the need to treat them as NMUs - no need to contact
> uploaders to ask permissions, delayed uploads, or anything like that.
> 
> Again, I really can't stress this enough - dropping the Uploaders is
> not because I think the uploaders have done anything wrong, or as
> punishment, or anything else, but simply and solely to remove all
> barriers stopping or hindering anybody else from doing team
> maintenance.

FWIW, while I don't object to this change for my own part, I also don't
have the same understanding as you of what Uploaders means in a
team-maintained package.  To my mind, Uploaders is just a hint as to
which team members are likely to have the most useful context about a
package.  It makes sense to keep that list up to date, for sure, but a
package is no less team-maintained just because it happens to have an
Uploaders field.

-- 
Colin Watson (he/him)                              [cjwatson@debian.org]