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,
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: