Re: Implementation of Developer's DB
On Thu, 22 Jan 1998, Ian Jackson wrote:
> I currently have about 5 different addresses that I publish for use in
> the Debian project, about 8 that I publish for system administration
> on my personal system, about 4 that I publish for personal use to
> various people, and 2 that I use for my employment. These addresses
> filter to 4 different physical mailboxes owned by me and to others
> owned by a number of other people. (This is not counting the several
> hundred mail-to-news gateways on my system, each of which has a
> separate email address.)
>
> I find this a very effective strategy for having my mail pre-sorted by
> the sender automatically and without a great deal of thought on their
> part. It's much more effective and robust than attempting to use
> procmail to do the same thing.
>
> Furthermore, role addresses make it much easier to move responsibility
> for tasks from one person or account to another without needing to
> reeducate all one's correspondents.
>
> Bottom line:
>
> You _will not_ persuade me to abandon this. If you make it mandated
> policy that I only have one email address I shall simply ignore you.
1. As original author of the Debian Policy Manual you should know that a
project like this _needs_ guidelines. In our case, all guidelines
documented in the different "policy" manuals (Policy Manual, Packaging
Manual, Developer's Reference) are based on a consensus among the
developers. The guidelines have not been set up just for fun, but because
there was a need to define how different parts of our distribution
(packages or maintainers) have to behave. _Everyone_ has to (at least try
to) conform to these guidelines, otherwise the guidelines would be
obsolete. Having no guidelines means anarchy. If this is what you want,
then please tell me so and I'm going to quit. (I know that this is not
what you want, but then please don't make such irritating statements.)
2. The current Policy Manual (version 2.3.0.1) reads:
---begin-quotation---
2.3.2 The maintainer of a package
[...]
The maintainer must be specified in the Maintainer control field with the
correct name and a working email address for the Debian maintainer of the
package. If one person maintains several packages he/she should try to
avoid having different forms of their name and email address in different
Maintainer fields.
---end-quotation---
Thus, current policy only _suggests_ to use the same email address for all
of one maintainer's packages.
The reason behind this is that currently there is no list of Debian
maintainers and there is no list of mail aliases of the Debian
maintainers. This means,
a) you don't know which packages in the archive are orphaned,
b) scripts can't determine which packages are maintained by the
same person (unless they `Maintainer' fields are identical), and
c) scripts creating lists of maintainers and their packages (i.e.,
the script on www.debian.org that creates the `People behind
Debian' web page) are complicated.
3. As you know, we are currently setting up a Developers' DB which
contains an authoritative list of Debian developers and their mail
aliases. Once this DB is set up and contains all the necessary data, we
can discuss to relax the policy regarding unique maintainer email
addresses, since the reasons behind current policy (see above) will
vanish.
Thanks,
Chris
-- Christian Schwarz
schwarz@monet.m.isar.de, schwarz@schwarz-online.com,
Debian has a logo! schwarz@debian.org, schwarz@mathematik.tu-muenchen.de
Check out the logo PGP-fp: 8F 61 EB 6D CF 23 CA D7 34 05 14 5C C8 DC 22 BA
pages at http://fatman.mathematik.tu-muenchen.de/~schwarz/debian-logo/
Reply to: