Re: [DEP5] [patch] Renaming the ‘Maintainer’ field ‘Contact’
On to, 2010-08-19 at 10:31 +0900, Charles Plessy wrote:
> my presonal point of view about fields in this DEP is that they should be
> required only if they are strictly necessary, and mentionned as optional only
> if there is a reasonable plan to parse and exploit the data.
>
> I am not aware of a requirement from the Policy or Joerg's message on
> debian-devel-announce in March 2006 for listing the package name in
> debian/copyright. Similarly, although it is required to list all authors of a
> packaged work, there is no requirement to list the upstream maintainer.
> Therefore, I think that the fields should be optional if they are not removed.
I don't think they're required by Policy or the ftpmasters. At least the
pkg-perl team is using Maintainer/Upstream-Contact. I don't think they
use Name/Upstream-Name. It's reasonable to expect the package
description to mention the upstream name if it differs from the Debian
package name, and that would make Upstream-Name somewhat unnecessary.
If pkg-perl, and perhaps others, are going to be using a field to keep
track of the upstream contact information anyway, it makes sense to have
a standard way of doing that. So I'd like to keep Upstream-Contact.
Anyone else have an opinion on this? That is, should we drop
Upstream-Name or not? Anyone opposed to keeping Upstream-Contact?
(The fields will, obviously, be optional, if we keep them in the spec.)
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