This is my proposal for an additional subsection in Debian Developers Reference Manual. It's not SGML clean probably, and feel free to modify english and formats. I collect this stuff on d-d ML.
<sect>Uploading sponsored packages. <p> There are more than a couple of good practices for uploading a sponsored package. All them can be used, and it is definitively a choice of the sponsoring developer what of them is more appropriate or profitable in every case. Let <email>[EMAIL PROTECTED]</email> be the sponsor of <email>[EMAIL PROTECTED]</email> for package <package>foo</package> <p> The sponsoring developer needs minimally to sign with his key the package, by rebuilding <package>foo</package> with <prgn>dpkg-buildpackage</prgn> and using the <tt>-k [EMAIL PROTECTED]</tt> or <tt>-e [EMAIL PROTECTED]</tt> option. The <tt>-e</tt> argument add also a convenient <email>Changed-By: [EMAIL PROTECTED]</email> entry in the <tt>.changes</tt> file. So no modification of the changelog or control file is required for the package and the maintainer remains <email>jack</email>. <p> If the sponsor developer <email>joe</email> prefers to leave a trace of his sponsorship job, he could also modify the most recent changelog entry as follows <example> foo (1.0-1) unstable; urgency=low Blah, blah, blah * Sponsor upload -- Joe Sponsor <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Wed, 23 Jan 2002 21:32:22 -0700 </example> <p> If <email>joe</email> finally would like to receive also all BTS reports for the package, and forwarding automatically them to <email>jack</email>, he could modify the <tt>Maintainer</tt> field in the control file in something like: <example> Maintainer: Jack sponsored by Joe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> </example> and add a <tt>~/.forward-sponsoring-jack</tt> file in his home on <tt>klecker.debian.org</tt>, which contains both his own email address and that of jack. <p> This modification should be removed by <email>jack</email>, whenever the sponsorship action ends and/or he does his first upload as a full Debian Developer. -- Francesco P. Lovergine
