Re: On terminology
Felipe Sateler <fsateler@debian.org> writes:
> On 05/07/10 20:25, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> So that they can upload a Debian package. They may have no intention
>> to become the maintainer. I see a real layer of additional distinction
>> from people who upload packages to people who are maintainers. The
>> latter is a role with a set of responsibilities that people pick up
>> consciously and that comes with a committment. Many Debian Maintainers
>> do take on that role, but it's not a necessary component to becoming a
>> Debian Maintainer or exercising the one additional capability that a DM
>> has.
> Hmm, I don't follow. To be a DM, you need to have someone advocate you
> on the grounds of your work as a package maintainer.
On the grounds of your work on packages, but I don't think it's
necessarily required that you be the maintainer of any particular package
(think of people who are members of packaging teams, for instance, and who
don't themselves do all of the tasks of the maintainer necessarily but do
need to do package uploads).
I'm sure that most DMs do also maintain at least one package, similar to
how most DDs do maintain at least one package even though there are other
reasons for being a DD, but I don't think they're philosophically tied.
> It seems to me that you don't consider people who are only listed as
> Uploaders as package maintainers.
Some of them are. Some of them aren't. For example, I am indeed a
package maintainer for the Shibboleth packages, but I'm not really a
maintainer for krb5. Sam is the maintainer; I'm a listed co-maintainer
since I try to help out as I find time, but I'm not committed to or
promising to do all the work that is involved in being a maintainer.
> I suspect a fair bunch of DMs will not appear on any package as
> maintainer, but only as Uploaders of packages maintained within a
> team. I myself never had a package with DMUA set for which I was the
> Maintainer: of the package.
There unfortunately isn't any way to really represent the difference with
our current metadata (and, to be fair, it probably doesn't matter that
much for most packages). There are lots and lots of people listed as
Maintainer or in Uploaders for various packages in Debian who are not
actually maintainers of those packages, for various reasons (often because
they were previously maintainers and still do some work).
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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