Matthew Garrett wrote:
Certainly, if they are modifying the packages, I would think the same there here applies as in the case of Ubuntu: they should reset the Maintainer field to point to themselves, and continue to give credit to the Debian developer in a suitable fashion.The founder of Debian seems to disagree, but still. The DCCA situation suggests that we need to define exactly what we want and make it clear to all derived distributions that this is what we expect. This isn't something that only affects Ubuntu - we're talking about a large number of fairly major distributions.
Come on, Matthew, that's a slight misrepresentation, now isn't it? Matthew is right that this has been common practice for as long as derivatives have been around (6-7 years now)--it's just that Ubuntu takes derivation much further than any of the rest of us have done, so the problem is a bit more pronounced for Ubuntu. Fact is, the potential for confusion here never even occurred to me when we started doing this at Progeny. Quite the contrary to what Matthew suggests, it seems to me that changing the Maintainer field is a perfectly reasonable thing to do now that I'm aware of it. -ian -- Ian Murdock 317-863-2590 http://ianmurdock.com/ "Don't look back--something might be gaining on you." --Satchel Paige