Re: maintainer policy and project organization
What ever happened to the package@debian.org concept? That would
be ideal since the maintainers of a package could decide how to
redirect that themselves and the easy access to the maintainer is
still there. This also abstracts the maintainer from the package.
I don't usually say "I'm having trouble with Bill's package", I
usually say "I'm having trouble with kde ...". Sending mail to
kde@debian.org or perl-base@debian.org seems to make sense. Perhaps
even a virtual domain dedicated to this like
package@pkgs.debian.org?
Anyway, Ian is right. The policy should reflect the way things
actually are, and the sexy side tools should work with reality. As
an aside, I don't see having an e-mail address that doesn't reflect
the current ownership of a package as helping to better organize or
manage the project (i.e. if a package has a team of five maintainers
and only one is allowed to get email). In fact I think the
maintainer field in a package has got little to do with change
management at all. I would like to see this applied to the case
cited in Chris's mail (the KBD project) to demonstrate how it would
improve the overall effectiveness of that project. I can't come up
with a scenario where it would.
I think the management of this project is a separate issue, but
there should be a mechanism by which any arbitrary maintainer could
"plug themself in" to the debian process. Then the maintainer side
of management could be a free for all, provided the interface
requirements are met (e.g. adhering to the current standards as
described in the policy manual).
I think the time for downloading someone else's code, running
debmake, and calling it a package need to come to an end and more
care (and probably more work) needs to get put into each package (to
get it to conform to some interoperability spec or some such,
perhaps just the policy manual). Since debian is based soley on free
software, there shouldn't be any licensing issues to worry about
with regard to this. The recent effort Jay started regarding a
comprehensive standards test suite would be extremely beneficial in
this regard. Better tools to help get to the point of conformance
would be good as well.
I think that getting into "maintainer management" is something
debian should avoid. It doesn't seem to have much to do with this
email address issue either, unless I've missed something.
P.S. The current developer's documentation is 100 fold better than
it was a year ago.
Cheers,
Richard
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