On Sun, May 01, 2005 at 10:38:01PM +0200, Alexander Wirt wrote: > Hi Matt! > > On Sun, 01 May 2005, Matt Zimmerman wrote: > > > On Sun, May 01, 2005 at 09:36:57PM +0200, Andreas Barth wrote: > > > > > Actually, I don't think that the packages.*-code is part of the problem. > > > Ubuntu treats the Debian maintainers at many places as "their" > > > maintainers, e.g. at apt-cache show $package. The packages.*-code just > > > displays that wrong information. > > > > [Note that this is an entirely different matter from the one mentioned in the > > original post] > > > > Every Debian derivative I have seen does this the same way. There is some > > inaccuracy in either case, but I think this is the lesser of the evils: > > > > - Changing the maintainer field > > - "<foo> is taking credit for my work!" > > - Requires modification of every source package, even if it is otherwise > > identical > If they change anything - this includes branding stuff too - the should > change the maintainer field. If the package is identical to the debian one > it could stay as it is. Although the source packages may be identical, the binary packages are often different -- Ubuntu is rebuilding the Debian packages against new libraries, such as python 2.4, resulting in different binary packages. Since the rebuilding is mostly automatic, and there's no maintainer on-hand to (hopefully) do a bit of QA on the generated packages before they go into the repository, unless a Master of the Universe happens upon broken packages (or is guided there by a bug report), they'll release like that. Unless and until all Debian packages have comprehensive go/no-go testsuites to be run at package build time (which would be very cool, but is unlikely to happen any time soon), or Ubuntu resolves it's problems stemming from "we don't have maintainers, we have teams" translating to "nobody is actually responsible for most of what we ship", this is going to be the way it will work. - Matt
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