Re: Maintainers, teams, Uploaders, DMs, DDs, etc.

[Darren Salt <listspam@moreofthesa.me.uk>]

I demand that Arno Töll may or may not have written...

[snip]
> 2) ... Drive-by sponsoring does not work. It's annoying and back-breaking
> to the sponsored maintainer to have a package containing lots of fixes and
> maybe a new upstream version but nobody who uploads the you've been working
> on (yes, that happens)

mercurial-buildpackage.

I recall being told that it should be rewritten in another language. I don't
disagree *but* that would involve more change and, possibly, make the changes
a lot less reviewable (and might introduce Many Bugs™). My choice here is to
get what I've done to it in the archive before any re-implementation is done.

(Incidentally, I'm using it for maintenance of the various xine packages.)

> 3) It's not helpful because the sponsor, at best, has a rough and cursory
> understanding how the package works.

There's possibly a case for enabling DMUA without requiring a sponsored
upload. But it would have to be case-by-case, and it's definitely not
something to be done lightly.

> 4) It's not clear at all how a bug fix could be uploaded to Debian at all,
> so the package might be in bad shape soon as nobody who /could/ upload
> feels responsible for it and those who care /can't/ upload.

Packages get left to rot. DMs don't bother with them because they've been
(effectively) ignored before; some may create external repositories for the
packages instead...

[snip]
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