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Re: about unique maintainer address policy



On Mon, 2 Feb 1998, Ian Jackson wrote:

> 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:
[example email addresses snipped]

Thanks for prividing the examples.

What do you think of the following policy for maintainer fields:

---cut-here-----------------------------------------------------------------

Each maintainer gets a (within the Debian project) unique `maintainer
name' (MN). Usually, this will be the full name of the person. If two
persons should have the same name, at least one of them has to add his/her
nick name to the MN to make it unique. 

With that, all `Maintainer:' fields must comply to the following format: 

   `MN <email@somewhere>'

where the email address can be any email address, as long as mail sent to
that address is received by the maintainer. Note, that the MN is always
unique for a maintainer, but the address may differ from package to
package.

The email addresses in the `Maintainer:' fields need not be the
`@debian.org' address of the maintainer. However, the maintainer has to
make sure that mail sent to his `@debian.org' address is forwarded to him. 

[The last sentence is completely new: Currently, a few people don't have a
working forward file on master or don't check their mail box there.]

Usually, a package has exactly _one_ maintainer. 

Only in rare situations, a package will be allowed to have several
maintainers. This is a special policy exception for a single package and
that exception has to be approved by a discussion on debian-devel. The
`Maintainer:' field of such a package would have to use the following
format:

   `MN1, MN2, MN3, ... <email@host>'

The maintainer MN1 is called `coordinator' of the package. (Note, that the
exact syntax with the commas `,' is important since such maintainer fields
need to be parsed by scripts.) 

With all this, the new `Developer DB' will store the MN's for each
maintainer--but not the email address. The mapping package->maintainer can
then be done simply by comparing the text in front of `<email@host'> to
the records in the DB. 

---cut-here-----------------------------------------------------------------


Comments are welcome!


Thanks,

Chris

--                  Christian Schwarz
                     schwarz@monet.m.isar.de, schwarz@schwarz-online.com,
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