Re: Contacting authors
Ian Jackson wrote:
> Martin Schulze writes ("Contacting authors"):
> > tonight I was thinking about implementing @authors.debian.org which
> > would enable a way for us to get in touch with the upstream authors of
> > some piece of software without the need of looking into the copyright
> > file or digging in the source if the maintainer forgot to add the
> > authors email into that file.
> >
> > What do you think about it?
> >
> > Example: hypermail@authors.debian.org would redirect the mail to
> > kent@landfield.com who is the current developer of hypermail.
>
> I'm sorry to say that I think this is a bad idea. I think most
> authors wouldn't want to be contacted in this way - I know that I in
> my capacity as upstream author wouldn't.
> Making it easy to contact the upstream author(s) in this way will
> encourage our users to contact them directly, and many (most) of these
> messages will be about Debian-specific things. One of the main
> reasons we have package maintainers is to filter bogus mail, so that
> upstream authors don't get bombarded with questions and bug reports
> about Debian.
How many maintainer are false contacted via the packages.debian.org
mechanism? This mechanism was implemented a long time ago and I
guess that it's even documented on the web somewhere.
> Thanks, and sorry to be negative,
No problem. That's why I've asked. For me the question is
not "to do or not to do" anymore but "do it locally or let
other maintainers benefit from it". Thus, a "stop that"
is ok, too.
You wouldn't want to implement any such mechanism?
Regards,
Joey
--
No question is too silly to ask, but, of course, some are too silly
to answer. -- Perl book
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