Bug#798476: debian-policy: don't require Uploaders
Hi,
On Thu, 10 Sep 2015, Charles Plessy wrote:
> if I remember well, this policy was set because some developers were
> (rightfully in my opinion) annoyed when the Maintainer field is a moderated
> mailing list and there is no Uploader field.
I don't think that this requirement makes sense. They can be rightfully annoyed
but it doesn't make sense to keep an outdated Uploaders field just to
please people so that they can mail people who no longer care about the
package.
If you need to find out someone who has some interest in the package, you
can always check who uploaded it last (or in the last X months).
IMO the hard requirement comes more from the fact that we don't like package
with no maintainer... those are effectively orphaned and should be up for
adoption by other maintainers.
> Perhaps this could be done by saying that as an exception to the rule, orphaned
> packages can use a mailing list as Maintainer, and adding a footnote explaining
> that this mailing list does not need to be the QA team.
Yes, I believe that this is the correct approach.
On Wed, 09 Sep 2015, Iain R. Learmonth wrote:
> An O bug is still filed on the package, but the Maintainer field remains
> unchanged (the decision of whether or not to change it is left to the
> person making the upload, the team may want rid of the package).
No, we should stop filing O bugs. Instead we have just come up with a
nice definition of an orphaned package, it's called the
no-human-maintainer lintian tag:
https://lintian.debian.org/tags/no-human-maintainers.
We can stop the busy work of filing O bugs and point people who wants to
adopt packages to that page.
> Any package that has no named person in the Maintainer field or
> Uploaders field should be considered orphaned and a free candidate for
> someone to come along and file an ITA.
Yes, they should be open for adoption (as part of the team ideally, except
when the team was the QA team), 0-day NMU, etc.
> The existing team in the Maintainer field of orphaned packages does not
> give an obligation for the adopter to maintain the package within that
> team, but until it is adopted the team will still recieve bug
> notifications, etc. and is likely to be more knowledgable on the package
> than the QA team in general.
While there's no obligation, we should not encourage people to take such
packages out of team maintainance. Having a team fallback is always better
than not having one.
Cheers,
--
Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer
Support Debian LTS: http://www.freexian.com/services/debian-lts.html
Learn to master Debian: http://debian-handbook.info/get/
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