Re: For those who care about their packages in Ubuntu
On Tue, Jan 17, 2006 at 09:45:13PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 17, 2006 at 11:07:40AM +0100, Reinhard Tartler wrote:
> > There have been no responses which would indicate what we should do.
>
> Actually, there've been lots, some of them are just contradictory.
There was a lot of discussion, much of which took place without
a clear understanding of the technical issues involved. I attempted to
summarize those and present the questions in a clear and unequivocally
answerable fashion, and I did not in fact receive a single answer. Now,
eight months later, some of the same discussions are being rehashed without
considering the issues and questions that I put forth in that summary
message.
> Personally, I'd suggest:
>
> * for unmodified debs (including ones that have been rebuilt, possibly
> with different versions of libraries), keep the Maintainer: field the
> same
Joey Hess and others in this thread have said that this is not acceptable to
them. What I need from Debian is either a clear consensus resulting from
discussion among developers, or an official decision from a position of
authority. Otherwise, we'd just be chasing our tail trying to please
individuals with conflicting opinions.
> * for debs in main that are modified, set the maintainer: field to the
> appropriate point of contact, and add a note to the copyright file as
> to the source you pulled from
>
> * for debs in universe that are modified, set the maintainer: field to the
> MOTU list or similar point of contact, and add a note to the copyright file
These two are equivalent, so we don't need to treat main and universe
separately.
> * for maintainers who want to keep their name in the maintainer field, even
> when modified by Ubuntu, invite them to join Ubuntu in the usual manner
I don't see how this would help. If we were to institute a policy (or more
likely, an automated process) to change the maintainer field, inviting the
maintainer to become an Ubuntu developer wouldn't have any obvious effect on
the process. What did you have in mind here?
> * for changes that are likely to be useful in Debian or generally, submit
> the change upstream, by filing a bug with a minimal patch included to
> bugs.debian.org, or by the appropriate mechanism further upstream.
Let's not conflate these entirely separate issues.
> > I'd prefer a solution which can be implemented in a reasonable time
> > frame, and which ends this annoyingly heated discussion once and for
> > all.
>
> It's rare that heated discussions are ever done with "once and for all"
> IME. Though the emacs/vi wars are cooler now than they were a decade ago.
There will always be differing personal preferences, but in spite of these,
there are times when an organization needs to take an official position on
behalf of its members, even if they don't all agree, so that other
organizations can respond to it with confidence. If a consensus can't be
reached informally, that's what I think we will need.
--
- mdz
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