Dear -devel, Way back in 2006 (19 years ago), #397761 was submitted to request for BTS to forward bug reports also to the Uploaders.
Dan Armstrong (don) wontfix'd it after stating that, quote:
If the maintainer is not given as a mailing list, then the uploaders should all subscribe to the PTS for a given package.
and
The problem is that if I start sending mails to Uploaders: in addition to the Maintainer, there is no way to opt out of it. It's far easier to subscribe to the pts and unsubscribe if Maintainer is not a list. [It should at least be an address that goes to a real person.]
Andreas Tille (tille) suggested that there could/should be a way to list bug reports of packages for which one is an Uploader. Adam Borowski (kilobyte) argued (in 2017, eleven years after, eight years until now) that things has changed after all these years;
(...) Not being told about a RC bug in your own package is a severe issue, and requiring an explicit subscription for something that usually works is not a thing one would think of or remember. The concept of Uploaders is no longer a novelty it was at the time.
also suggested that one could surely "opt out" by removing themself from Uploaders. I added that a. team maintenance means hundreds or thousands emails sent to the team Maintainer address, many of which are probably for packages a particular maintainer doesn't care about, and b. it's a hassle and often forgotten to subscribe to all those tens or hundreds of packages one maintains. Well, that can be automated, so this is not a strong argument, but option 2 would still make it better. Options I can think of: 1. Let BTS forward to Uploaders Reiterating my point in previous reply to #397761: Policy 5.6.3 states the Uploaders field is
List of the names and email addresses of co-maintainers of the package, if
any.
Policy didn't clarify, but if we consider "co-maintainer" a person who does the
same job as the one listed as Maintainer, just not listed there, then this person is
effectively also a maintainer. And maintainers ought to monitor and deal with bug reports.
If it's so decided that BTS still shouldn't forward to Uploaders,
2. Let PTS automatically subscribe maintainers to packages they are Uploaders of
In the current version of the PTS, subscribing to a package means either a. after logging
in, clicking the Subscribe button on tracker.debian.org/pkg/foo, and optionally changing
topics ("keywords"); b. with devscripts installed, running `pts-subscribe foo
[--forever]`, with no way to change topics. For each package one maintains, this has to
be done once.
Instead of asking every maintainer to repeat that for every package they
maintains, we can have the PTS automatically subscribe them to packages they
are, and in the future, when they become, an Uploader of.
Conversely, also unsubscribe those who are removed from Uploaders of a package.
Though it's possible some want to continue receiving updates of a package even
after stepping down as its Uploader.
3. Add the option to subscribe to a package on BTS
This would at least allow people who don't/wouldn't use PTS to receive new bug
reports for packages they care about. PTS is a separate service that happens to
forward BTS bug reports, in a way.
4. Better ideas?
(I'm also confused by the fact that follow-ups to bug reports aren't forwarded
to submitters by default, but the submitter must X-Debbugs-Cc themselves, but
then which is basically the default behavior of reportbug(1) now IIRC, but
that's for another time.)
--
Sdrager,
Blair Noctis
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