about unique maintainer address policy
Hi folks!
As you all probably know, current policy suggests that each maintainer
uses the same email address on all his/her packages. This policy was
specified to allow a mechanical (i.e., via scripts) mapping from packages
to persons. (For example, this is needed to check for orphaned packages,
or to produce the `People behind Debian' web page.)
Since we are currently setting up a Maintainer DB (i.e., a database which
contains some information about each maintainer), and since a few people
have requested to be allowed to use different addresses on their packages,
we should discuss whether and how we should relax this policy aspect.
Whatever the new policy for `Maintainer:' entries will be, we still have
the requirement to have a unique maintainer -> person mapping. So, if we
allow different email addresses, I see the following practical options:
- change the current DB schema to be able to store different
"Maintainer:" email addresses for each person
- restrict the maintainer addresses to a unique format, i.e., the
addresses have to be `<pkg>@somewhere' so we list `@somewhere' in
the DB (people that only use a single address on all their packages
still could use `something@somewhere', of course)
- specify by policy that the maintainer addresses have to use the
format
"Full and unique name of maintainer <somewhere@someplace.com>"
then, we'd just check for the "Full and unique..." part when comparing
"Maintainer:" fields to the DB records
-> nick names would also be allowed as long as the name is unique
I'd prefer option #3, but of course, comparing email addresses is probably
easier since they don't contain spaces, etc.
Any comments are appreciated! I'd would be good if we can come to a
consensus quickly since we (Tim and I) are currently working on the DB and
want to fill it ASAP.
Thanks,
Chris
-- Christian Schwarz
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schwarz@debian.org, schwarz@mathematik.tu-muenchen.de
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