Re: binary-alpha and binary-sparc directories

[Ian Jackson <ian@chiark.chu.cam.ac.uk>]

Bill Mitchell writes ("Re: binary-alpha and binary-sparc directories"):
> This seems shakey -- especially if we posit that the i386 maintainer
> is in the U.S., the Mac maintainer in Germany, and the PowerPC maintainer
> in Korea.  Also, the upstream source maintainer might be in Romania,
> and might not be be interested in picking up the Mac and PowerPC
> changes which our maintainers have made to his source code.

The (primary) maintainer of a package is the one who maintains the
*source*.  They may not necessarily build the i386 binary, perhaps
only the m68k or some such.

A Debian source package should compile under any architecture (unless
its function is inherently architecture-specific).  If it doesn't it
is a bug which it is the responsibility of the primary maintainer to
fix.  If the primary maintainer doesn't fix it we should consider the
package orphaned, and then the person trying to build for another
architecture can upload their source as the generic source, either
officially taking over the package or just putting out an `interim'
release.

There's no problem, btw, with having several source versions in the
FTP site.  We should only delete an old source version when all the
old binaries have been replaced with the new ones (this is a GPL
requirement, amongst other things).

Ian.