Re: [DEP5] [patch] Renaming the ‘Maintainer’ field ‘Contact’
On Sun, Aug 15, 2010 at 05:25:34PM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote:
> > 1. Rename Maintainer: to Contact:
> > 2. Rename Maintainer: to Upstream-Contact: and Name: to Upstream-Name:
> > 3. Drop both Maintainer: and Name: completely, even as optional fields
> In my experience, packagers do their best, and will try to use the optional
> fields if possible, so if there is no plan to parse them and use the data, I
> would also recommend to save everybody's time and drop them.
> The Policy recommends to “name the original authors of the package and the
> Debian maintainer(s) who were involved with its creation”, but it is debated
> (#462996) whether it is authoritative on the subject or not. Also, one could
> argue that the Copyright fields serve exactly that purpose, especially if this
> field is allowed in the header.
The Copyright field should only ever be used to list copyrights. To use it
for any other purpose would be gratuitously confusing. So no, it does not
serve the purpose of identifying an upstream contact/maintainer.
--
Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/
slangasek@ubuntu.com vorlon@debian.org
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