Re: upstream concerns
On Mon, Jul 26, 1999 at 10:10:21AM -0400, James A. Treacy wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 26, 1999 at 02:51:54PM +0200, Francesco Tapparo wrote:
> > I'm maintaining scwm; Greg Badros, an upstream author, contacted me about
> > the page http://www.debian.org/Bugs/db/pa/lscwm.html. This page is a bit
> > misleading:
> >
> > "Maintainer for scwm is Francesco Tapparo <cesco@debian.org>. "
> >
> > He would like better something as:
> > "Scwm is written by Greg J. Badros and Maciej Stachowiak.
> > Scwm's home web site is: scwm.mit.edu.
> > The maintainer for the Debian scwm package is Francesco Tapparo..."
> >
> It is well understood that 'maintainer' in the above refers to the
> person who maintains the Debian package.
Yes, but I suspect a lot of people does not understand that: the concept
itself of debian and upstream maintainer is foreign to the proprietary
world (where only one manifacturer can modify and distribute the software),
and so the new Linux users (coming from W9*, NT and other proprietary OS) can
have some difficulty to realize the difference; because of the exponential
growth of Linux, they are a lot of people.
>
> > and links to the upstream scwm page.
> >
> We have wanted the ability to easily create links to the upstream
> maintainers site for ages. Unfortunately, we don't currently have a
> mechanism for easily finding this info. Until that happens, such links
> won't be created automatically. :(
>
> If the upstream author would like links added to the description
> (which are simply taken from the description the maintainer writes),
> then he should ask the package maintainer.
Good, I was assuming that these pages was only an output of some script, so I
was thinking only about the script. But if these pages can be moddified on a
per package basis (wow: a lot of work!), then I'd very happy to give the
informations necessary (do I am the scwm package maintainer).
>
> BTW, many authors of software like our current system so that bug reports
> get filtered through the package maintainer. The maintainer can then
> filter packaging problems from the reports so the author doesn't get
> burdened with Debian specific problems.
Yes, and I realize that we cannot simply put their email address in our web
pages (even because of privacy and spam problems) I was thinking about an
optional behavior: the default behaviour would be the current one.
>
> > I agree with Greg. So I think would be very useful if the script generating
> > the pages would be updated to properly use an "Upstream Maintainer/s" and an
> > "Upstream Web Page" fields in the packages.
> > Is this feasible or it's hard? I'm not sure I've the needed skillful for
> > the job (I do'nt master html), but I can try.
> >
> As stated above, it is simply a matter of being able to find the info.
> Actually putting the information on the web page is trivial. The fields
> you describe don't exist. I have asked many times for a way to
> unambiguously access such info, but to no avail (adding it to the Packages
> files is not the way to go. They are too big already).
Yes, here you are right.
>
> Jay Treacy
>
thanks for your reply
--
Francesco Tapparo | cesco@debian.org
fight for your software freedoms: www.fsf.org | tapparo@mat.unimi.it
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