When should -legal contact maintainers [Was: Re: Question for candidate Robinson]
[This is wildly OT for -vote, MFT set to -legal and CC:'ed, please
follow up there or privately.]
On Thu, 10 Mar 2005, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> > On Thu, Mar 10, 2005 at 12:52:20AM +0100, Sven Luther wrote:
> > > Still, debian-legal should inform the maintainers and invite them to take
> > > part of the discussion when examining packages which have been in main for
> > > years.
>
> I think he's right about this. For one thing, as he just explained,
> he got upset precisely because he wasn't informed; it's reasonable
> to assume that the way in which his discussion would have been
> performed would have been 'slightly' different had he been informed
> in time. I *do* think it is good practice for d-legal contributors
> to inform a packages' maintainer if they are discussing its license;
> we do the same with other types of bugs.
If -legal is specifically discussing a license of a package, the
maintainer is generally informed[1] when the discussion is actually
happening. However, (almost) no one bothers to inform the maintainers
when general discussion of a license is occuring, in the first part
because most of the discussion isn't particularly useful to most
maintainers, and secondly, because people have better things to do[1]
than track down which packages are covered by a license when the
critical issues (if any) haven't been discussed or discerned yet.
In the latter stages of the discussion, if there really are issues
with a license that packages in Debian are using, bugs are typically
opened against the packages, ideally with a short summary of the
specific issues that the license has, and suggestions for what the
maintainer can do to fix the license. (And quite often offers of help
in explaining the problems to upstream as well.)
As far as the analogy to "normal" bugs goes, the preliminary
discussion is generally on the order of "is this really a bug?" as is
typically seen on -devel. [Or, in the extreme case, figuring out
whether mass bug filing is sane.] Surely no maintainer expects to be
notified every time someone asks on -user, -devel (or $DEITY forbid,
IRC[3]) whether specific behavior from a package constitutes a bug.
Don Armstrong
1: Or at least, when I'm starting the discussion, I usually inform
them... most contributors that I've seen do the same. (#242281 FE)
2: But by all means, feel free to follow -legal and make such
announcements to maintainers who are actually interested in them.
3: If they did, I'm sure I'd be on everyone's killfile by now, since I
get asked these sorts of questions all the time.
--
I'd never hurt another living thing.
But if I did...
It would be you.
-- Chris Bishop http://www.chrisbishop.com/her/archives/her69.html
http://www.donarmstrong.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu
Reply to: