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Re: Non-DD's in debian-legal



Adeodato Simó <adeodato@debian.org> writes:

> So let's make an analogy. Imagine one day, the bulk of Debian Developers
> stop being interested in maintaining GNOME (or KDE, if you wish). The
> packages begin to rot, become obsolete, uninstallable, etc. Then, a group
> of non-developers who care about GNOME and, also, care about GNOME being
> in good shape in Debian, step up and try to help.

Absolutely.  That's the Debian Way(tm).

> The thing is that, no matter how much they work and no matter how high
> quality their packages are, at the end it _HAS_ to be a Debian Developer
> the one to sign the .changes file. Credit and acknowledgement will go
> to the non-developers, of course, since they did the work, but a DD has
> to review and sign it before it is consider oficially part of Debian.

That's where the analogy breaks down, though.  Analyzing software
licensing situations doesn't require upload rights or a key on the
developer key-ring.  In fact, it doesn't require any developer
privileges at all -- unless you count posting on debian mailing lists
and occasionally filing bugs as developer privilege.

> And, if sadly no developer would be interested in uploading those packages, 
> those contributors do not get to create an Alioth project, set up a
> repository, _and_ tell the world those are the official GNOME packages for
> Debian. They can create the project, set up the repo, and inform interested
> parties that they believe those packages are suitable for Debian, that they 
> would like to see them in the official archive, and the reasons why they are
> in gnome.alioth.debian.org instead of ftp.debian.org.
>
> As you'll understand, nobody would like for debian-legal@lists.debian.org
> to become the gnome.alioth.debian.org in the example above.

I'm afraid I don't understand the fear here.  What would it mean for d-l
to become gnome.alioth.debian.org in your example?

-- 
Jeremy Hankins <nowan@nowan.org>
PGP fingerprint: 748F 4D16 538E 75D6 8333  9E10 D212 B5ED 37D0 0A03



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