Andrew Suffield wrote:
On the other hand, I think there might be some benefit to requiring that the Maintainer field must always denote one single Debian developer, who would be the "buck stops here" guy for that package. Not an applicant, not a mailing list, and not a group of people. I believe the tools have now advanced to the point where this is a practical option.In general you're always far better off forcing every *change* to a given component to go through a single individual. Large projects need a pumpking, because dogpiling creates lousy software. For Debian this would be cumbersome and unwieldy as a rule, but some high-importance tasks could benefit from it.
I think you have something here, but I think allowing an applicant/mailing list in maintainer should be ok. In the case of an applicant, if they're doine the work, they both deserve the credit and should be the one to get all the messages that the various debian infrastructures sends out (Archive scripts, BTS, point of contact for security, etc). The latter also holds for mailing lists.
Instead, why not propose a Responsible-For: header for control that lists a person inside the project who the buck stops with in the case of an applicant or team maintained package?
Benjamin
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