Re: Why do we list individual copyright holders?
Markus Koschany <apo@debian.org> writes:
> I believe that the Standards-Version header should not be part of a
> debian/control file. I understand your reasoning why you want to keep it
> and why it is useful for you. Though in my opinion a debian/control
> file, or generally speaking all information in debian/, should be hard
> requirements and either technically necessary for building a package or
> legally required. The Standards-Version header is a soft requirement,
> someone may or may not find it useful for maintaining the package. For
> team-maintained packages, which all can look very similar, updating this
> header quickly becomes a repetitive task.
> This is comparable to the Vcs-{Git/Svn} and Vcs-Browser fields.
Unlike the Vcs-* headers, which hold information that can change
independently of the package and therefore are a poor match for being
hard-coded into the source package and requiring an upload to change (we
just didn't have a better mechanism at the time), Standards-Version
documents information about the source package itself, and changes are
necessarily linked to changes to the source package (to make it comply
with later versions).
So no, I don't agree with this analysis; I think the Standards-Version
header is a fairly good match for being in the source package itself.
I'm also very reluctant to move too much maintenance information outside
of the source package, because we do not require everyone in Debian to use
the same way to maintain packages. If we forced everyone maintaining a
package to use Launchpad, for instance, it might make sense to store this
information in Launchpad. But right now anyone can use whatever methods
and data stores that make them the most productive, and the only common
link between us is the source package and archive. Therefore, any
information that should survive changes of maintainers (possibly
uncoordinated due to people losing contact with the project) needs to be
in the source package where the next maintainer, QA folks, NMUers, and so
forth can find it. Or elsewhere in the Debian infrastructure, of course,
but there's currently nowhere else in the Debian infrastructure that the
maintainer has to always keep up to date.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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