Re: Non-DDs as official Debian package maintainers
* Jonas Smedegaard:
> Packages with noone explicitly nursing them is a bad thing. that's why
> we have the routine of "oh - someone seems to be MIA - let's check what
> packages is hurt by this". This is not (easily) trackable with
> sponsored packages.
Exactly. The sponsorship relation is usually not documented publicly.
Apart from the problem that it's not exactly straightforward to
discover which DD authorized an upload, we do not know if the upload
comes from a permanent sponsorship, or was a one-time upload to stand
in for a DD who is temporarily unavailable (maybe due to vacation).
My somewhat controversial remark which led to this thread was
particularly inspired by bug #316276. Certainly a comparable
situation can arise for DD-maintained packages as well, but we seem to
have some procedures to deal with that. In additiona, fewer people
are invovled, which helps with coordination and to avoid stepping on
someone's toes.
> So again: What is the responsibility of sponsoring, if not the full
> responsibility of "everything the non-DD did to make the software
> suitable for inclusion into Debian" (what I call "maintainance")?
The implications of sponsorship puzzle me as well. There doesn't seem
to be much agreement about what the exact duties of a sponsor are.
Sponsors typically identify themselves only in eight base64-encoded
bytes. Perhaps this contributes to the lack of transparency.
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