Re: Maintainer responsible for or only doing maintenance?

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Jonas Smedegaard <dr@jones.dk> writes:

> My point is that either we are all wasting our time declaring a
> meaningless "Maintainer:" control field, or Bernd is wrong and the
> uploader responsibility is for the contents of the upload - which
> includes stating who is then to be held responsible for the
> maintainance.

> In my interpretation, maintainer is expected to act responsibly.

I think this is too stark, or at least I feel like my personal position on
this is part of an excluded middle.

For the specific case of sponsored packages, for exactly the reasons that
you have argued previously on this thread, we know that the package
maintainer's affiliation with (and often committment to) Debian may not be
as strong as the Debian Developer who is sponsoring the package.
Therefore, in the specific case of sponsored packages, while the package
maintainer is still responsible, we ask the sponsor to exercise some
oversight over that responsibility and be prepared to step in if the
maintainer is not fulfilling that responsibility for whatever reason.

I think we also, at least informally, recognize the sponsor has having
more control over the package than they normally would when they're not
the maintainer, precisely because with repsonsibility should come the
power to exercise that responsibility.

I don't know if this is all explicitly written down anywhere, but it's
certainly my feel of the general consensus and social expectations of the
people who discuss this sort of thing on debian-mentors.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>