Proposal: Sponsorship Uploads
This is my proposal for an additional subsection in Debian Developers
Reference Manual. It's not SGML clean probably, and feel free to
modify english and formats.
I collect this stuff on d-d ML.
<sect>Uploading sponsored packages.
<p>
There are more than a couple of good practices for uploading a sponsored
package. All them can be used, and it is definitively a choice of
the sponsoring developer what of them is more appropriate or
profitable in every case.
Let <email>joe@debian.org</email> be the sponsor of
<email>jack@somewhere.com</email> for package <package>foo</package>
<p>
The sponsoring developer needs minimally to sign with his key the package,
by rebuilding <package>foo</package> with <prgn>dpkg-buildpackage</prgn>
and using the <tt>-k joe@debian.org</tt> or <tt>-e joe@debian.org</tt>
option.
The <tt>-e</tt> argument add also a convenient
<email>Changed-By: joe@debian.org</email>
entry in the <tt>.changes</tt> file. So no modification of the changelog
or control file is required for the package and the maintainer remains
<email>jack</email>.
<p>
If the sponsor developer <email>joe</email> prefers to leave a trace of
his sponsorship job, he could also modify the most recent changelog
entry as follows
<example>
foo (1.0-1) unstable; urgency=low
Blah, blah, blah
* Sponsor upload
-- Joe Sponsor <joe@debian.org> Wed, 23 Jan 2002 21:32:22 -0700
</example>
<p>
If <email>joe</email> finally would like to receive also all BTS reports
for the package, and forwarding automatically them to <email>jack</email>,
he could modify the <tt>Maintainer</tt> field in the control file
in something like:
<example>
Maintainer: Jack sponsored by Joe <joe-sponsoring-jack@klecker.debian.org>
</example>
and add a <tt>~/.forward-sponsoring-jack</tt> file in his home
on <tt>klecker.debian.org</tt>,
which contains both his own email address and that of jack.
<p>
This modification should be removed by <email>jack</email>,
whenever the sponsorship action ends and/or he does his first upload
as a full Debian Developer.
--
Francesco P. Lovergine
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