On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 04:07:47PM +0100, Mehdi Dogguy wrote:
> Package: dh-ocaml
Thanks Mehdi for the bug report.
... bug report which I asked for to revamp the issue of Uploaders
management in our packages.
The current situation is, at best, unorganized:
- some packages have specific maintainers
- some other (the vast majority) have d-o-m as maintainer, with
sub-cases for how Uploaders is managed
- some have a list which is the same since years, not representing
the reality of the package contributors
- some have an arbitrary list of people which used to be defined in
ocaml.mk to represent a situation of contributors of years ago
- some have people adding themselves the first time they touch a
package, with no "garbage collection" whatsoever
I don't like this, well, mess.
Given that packages are team maintained I think it makes sense to
require some uniformity.
My proposal is to do as the Gnome people do, namely: you consider the
current debian/changelog, you took the list of last n different
contributors listed in it, and you generate Uploaders from it.
There are various facets of this proposal to be discussed:
0) who should be in Maintainer??
- my proposal: there should always be "Debian OCaml Maintainers" for
packages maintained using our VCSs. Uploaders is then handled with
the rules being proposed (if accepted, of course)
1) how much is n?
- my proposal: 5 is a reasonable number
2) how technically is updated Uploaders?
- my proposal: no debian/control.in (it's a PITA). Hence a plain
debian/control, with a debian/rules target (to be implemented in
ocamlinit.mk) which replaces in place, a-la "sed -i", the current
Uploaders value with the one computed from debian/changelog. That
target can be invoked from time to time, ideally before each
upload (but with no strict enforcement), to update Uploaders.
A technical possibility to implement (2) is the .mk file pointed to
by Mehdi's bug report.
Note 1: this proposal does not want to force people into/out-to
Uploaders fields. You always has the change to not adding your name in
debian/changelog for example, since VCS logs are always there. Or else
we can implement some whitelist/blacklist mechanisms in the Uploaders
management mechanism. I first want to understand if we agree on the
policy, the mechanism can then be tuned accordingly.
Note 2: ... nevertheless, if you make a change to some package, it is
reasonable to expect you to take some responsibility for that package
in the forthcoming period; your name in Uploaders is a way to expresse
that. It is the same as doing NMUs, you should for a while care about
the package you affected.
I'm looking forward for people pro or against this proposal.
Cheers
PS Yes, I've already did this proposal in the past, and IIRC it was
rejected. Nevertheless since then:
- the team has been changed quite a lot
- I've shared the duty of bookkeeping Uploaders fields to implement
people request to be added / removed
- I have the feeling (sorry: no proofs) that we have accepted more
and more team maintenance in the last OCaml release cycles; a
more team-oriented management of Uploaders I think is the natural
consequence of that
--
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
Dietro un grande uomo c'è ..| . |. Et ne m'en veux pas si je te tutoie
sempre uno zaino ...........| ..: |.... Je dis tu à tous ceux que j'aime
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