Re: about unique maintainer address policy

[Ian Jackson <ian@chiark.greenend.org.uk>]

Christian:
> It would be good if the people who want our policy to be changed in
> this respect (Ian?) to tell us their opinion. I want to set up the DB
> ASAP and this is the only open question that's left...

Amongst addresses that I'm involved with which Debian also has to deal
with:

 For lout, userv &c.:
  Ian Jackson <ian@chiark.greenend.org.uk>

 dpkg:
  Ian Jackson and Klee Dienes <dpkg-maint@chiark.greenend.org.uk>

 Leadership role:
  Ian Jackson <leader@debian.org>

 In .changes files (though I could change this is it makes dinstall
 think they're non-maintainer releases):
  Ian Jackson <ian@davenant.greenend.org.uk>

 For certain bug reports, as submitter:
  Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk>
  Ian Jackson <sysadmin@chiark.greenend.org.uk>

 Bug system admin:
  Ian Jackson (and Guy Maor) <owner@bugs.debian.org>

 Bug system upstream maintenance:
  Ian Jackson <debbugs-maint@chiark.greenend.org.uk>

 Userv upstream maintenance:
  Ian Jackson <userv-maint@chiark.greenend.org.uk>

 For urgent correspondence to ian@chiark:
  Ian Jackson <ian-*censored*@chiark.greenend.org.uk>
 (The actual string is obvious, but I've removed it to prevent abuse.
 Email there by invitation only.)

Things to note: Most these addresses are delivered to distinct sets of
actual mailboxes.  If Michael Dorman decides to join the budding dpkg
development team then the latter's name will change, but not the
address.

A number of observations can be made here (with a bit of imagination
and thought):

* A single person can have different addresses belonging to just
themselves, which they use in different contexts - perhaps for the
maintenance and/or upload of different packages.

* Not all packages are maintained by exactly one person; some are
maintained by teams.  When there is a team the composition of the team
may be well-defined or ill-defined, and will not necessarily be
reflected in the contents of the packages' Maintainer fields.

* Someone who is both the upstream and Debian maintainer of a generic
(ie, non Debian specific) package may use an address in the Maintainer
field of that package which is different from that they use for other
Debian packages.

* A person may have role addresses which belong to a post they hold
rather than to them personally.  These might appear in documentation,
but not necessarily in Maintainer fields.

* A person may have addresses which are published to some parts of the
Project or for some purposes but which are not published elsewhere
(for example in documentation or Maintainer fields).

I think that any developer database should try to take these things
into account, and try to arrange that the database fails gracefully
when parts of it become out of date (for example, when the holder of a
post changes).

Ian.