Maintainer vs. Uploaders
[Barry Warsaw, 2015-09-29]
> How should the change be acknowledged by the
> maintainer? Should I Cc the mailing list when I contact the maintainer? Is
do we really need a written policy how to contact fellow co-maintainer?
Ping on IRC, send an email, send a message via xmpp or phone, ... use
whatever you usually use to contact any other Debian maintainer.
An example message:
"I just commited some changes in foo related to bar. Please take a look,
I plan to upload it to unstable in a day or two. Let me know if I should
wait a bit longer or if you're not OK with these changes. Thanks"
I think such message to all Uploaders who clearly know more about given
package than I do is a good practice even if team is listed in
Maintainer field. I don't think sending such message after fixing a typo
is needed, but it's definitely a must when someone replaces dh with
cdbs or vice versa.
> it okay to commit to vcs but not upload? How long do you wait for feedback
> before you can do the upload?
yes, it's always OK to commit changes (which can be reverted). It's not OK
to force someone else to maintain these changes by uploading it.
> Should we have some automated tools to help out here? I'm not sure where to
no, we already have -commits mailing list which nobody reads. Yet
another reason why team should be in Uploaders and not in Maintainer
field.
> Do all team members understand the implications when they set the two fields?
> Some maintainers may not really care and may have been less conscientious
> about setting the fields.
Maintainer vs Uploaders rules needs to be moved to policy. I will
propose a patch to the policy soon (I'd prefer a native speaker to do
it, though)
> The wiki says that the general rule of thumb is to set the team as Maintainer,
> to which I agree.
I don't (due to "package and forget" issue)
--
Piotr Ożarowski Debian GNU/Linux Developer
www.ozarowski.pl www.griffith.cc www.debian.org
GPG Fingerprint: 1D2F A898 58DA AF62 1786 2DF7 AEF6 F1A2 A745 7645
Reply to: