Bug#581011: Maintainer/Uploaders nomenclature
"J.M.Roth" <jmroth+debbug@iip.lu> writes:
> I was always wondering (concerning 5.6.2/5.6.3):
> 1) The "Maintainer" field can contain only ONE contributor, whereas
> there may be several to the package.
> 2) The "Uploaders" field can contain several people, whereas -
> technically - there can be only one uploader.
> Furthermore, having the "Uploaders" field is redundant anyhow, since the
> actual DD/DM who uploaded can be found from his/her signature.
> "Uploaders" might also just be the wrong description. Either it should
> be called "Contributors", since it often contains the actual
> contributors (that's even what policy says) and - sometimes - even not
> the actual uploader. In addition to point 2) above, it might as well be
> dropped, if "Maintainer" was allowed to contain several people.
> Sometimes it simply contains a group anyhow (like the PHP people at
> alioth and such). Since neither the Maintainer nor Uploaders field
> actually needs to contain any DD/DM all this becomes even more strange.
> I'm not sure why all of this is that way. It just seems to have evolved
> that way - for whatever reasons and I'm just saying that it seems not
> very logical. ;-)
Joerg has already explained how we ended up here and that it's probably
not worth changing the names of the fields at this point. I've just
merged another change to Policy (http://bugs.debian.org/459868) that
clarifies the purpose of the fields and when Uploaders must be used. I
think that change should resolve some of the confusion, so I'm going to
mark this bug as fixed by that change as well.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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