Re: `Every package must have exactly one maintainer'
(Sorry for the late reply. Nevertheless, I still consider this topic as
very important.)
On Wed, 4 Mar 1998, Ian Jackson wrote:
> I'm afraid I still want to beat this dead horse.
Me too :)
> I think it is a mistake to think that this requirement is even
> meaningful. Remember that we are a project of volunteers; things get
> done by the people who have time, inclination and (hopefully)
> competence to do them.
>
> Requiring that only one person is somehow `authorised' to do something
> or `be responsible' for something when everyone might otherwise be
> perfectly happy for many people to do it, and when we can't `hold
> anyone responsible' for anything anyway, is unhelpful.
>
> I can think of only two possible reason for saying that a package
> might be required to have only one maintainer:
>
> 1. Decisionmaking in case of disagreement.
[snip]
>
> 2. Blame.
[snip]
I can think over two other good reasons:
3. The maintainer knows that he is in charge of the package. For example,
it's much easier to detect in-actively maintained packages if there is
only one person listed in the maintainer field.
4. A unique point of communication. In case of questions WRT a
packages' `interface', it's much easier for other maintainers to get
an `authoritative' answer if you have one person to contact.
Notes:
1. One result I take from this discussion is that the term `Maintainer'
is not accurate enough. Perhaps it would be better to speak of a
`Package Coordinator' or `Manager'.
2. Having only one person listed in the "Maintainer:" field does not mean
that only one person works on a package! It only means, that there is
a unique person who coordinates all changes.
3. If we had a few positive examples of multi-maintainer packages which
are maintained well, I wouldn't be so picky about this. Unfortunately,
we still have communication problems with the two multi-maint packages
we have (dpkg and boot-floppies).
(E.g., I've posted a question WRT maintenance of the packaging manual
to debian-dpkg yesterday, but haven't received an answer so far. The
last uploads of dpkg have all been NMUs, and have been done by
different persons. With that, it's really hard to know what's the
current status of dpkg. For example, the emacs changelog-mode is
still missing in dpkg-dev, and this is known for weeks and very
annoying for lots of maintainers--but noone cares about it. I even
offered taking over maintainership of dpkg to coordinate all
efforts--but this mail has never been answered by the dpkg
maintainers.)
Thanks,
Chris
-- Christian Schwarz
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