[Is the subject a good title for this thread?? ;-]
On Tue, 3 Feb 1998, Ian Jackson wrote:
> Christian proposes:
> ...
> > [The last sentence is completely new: Currently, a few people don't have a
> > working forward file on master or don't check their mail box there.]
> >
> > Usually, a package has exactly _one_ maintainer.
> >
> > Only in rare situations, a package will be allowed to have several
> > maintainers. This is a special policy exception for a single package and
> > that exception has to be approved by a discussion on debian-devel. The
> > `Maintainer:' field of such a package would have to use the following
> > format:
>
> You're being (a) unclear and (b) overly restrictive. You imply some
> kind of permission is required for having several maintainers for a
> single package. This is not / should not be the case.
Well, first of all current policy says ``Every package must have exactly
one maintainer at a time.'' (see section 2.3.2 The maintainer of a
package). So this is the case. Whether it `should' be the case needs to be
discussed.
We already had a discussion about this a few weeks ago--that's why I
didn't include more comments. If you want, we can discuss this again. It
will surely be an intresting discussion. But please note, that this little
sentence is very `fundamental' to our development process so the
discussion will take some time and is likely to end up with a flame war
;-)
To avoid this I prefered (for now) to stick with current policy but allow
exceptions in certain (approved) cases.
> > `MN1, MN2, MN3, ... <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>'
> >
> > The maintainer MN1 is called `coordinator' of the package. (Note, that the
> > exact syntax with the commas `,' is important since such maintainer fields
> > need to be parsed by scripts.)
>
> This doesn't allow well for largeish groups. What if they want to put
> the group name in the `phrase' part of the email address ? Will it
> not cause confusion if different users of the address put in different
> comments ?
>
> I think you need an exception mechanism, for things that otherwise
> don't fit. Computer-based systems with no good manual override are
> often a bad thing.
>
> Furthermore, commas are no good because they're already a separator
> for separate addresses in a single field. (Admittedly we already
> allow a syntax like John F. Bloggs <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> which is not
> permitted by RFC822.)
>
> I suggest that in cases where a package is maintained by several
> people the list of people _not_ necessarily be kept in the developer
> DB. If this causes some maintainers to appear not to be doing
> anything we can add them specially, or something.
Ok, this is a very good point. After all, according to my proposal to have
multi-maintainer packages approved by some procedure, such an `override'
file could easily kept up-to-date.
So let me summarize the ideas to make sure we are talking about the same
things:
1. Usually, a package is maintained by one person and the "Maintainer:"
field should be "Some Unique Name <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>". While the email address
may be different for each package, the "Some Unique Name" has to be unique
for each maintainer. The Developer DB will contain a field for that name.
(Note, that that name does not necessarily have to be the full name of the
maintainer.)
2. In some cases a package will be maintained by a group of people. This
is an exception to our policy and requires special approval. The
"Maintainer:" field for such packages will be of the form
"Description-of-the-Maintainer-Group <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>" where the
"Description"
uniquely defines a set of maintainers, and may be listed on several
packages which are all maintained by the same developers.
The email address has to be some mail alias; all mails sent to that
address have to be forwarded to all maintainers in the group.
There will be a special `maintainer-override' file which will map these
maintainer-group descriptions to the actual maintainer names (as in the
DB).
3. Every maintainer has to make sure her/his [EMAIL PROTECTED]' address is
functional.
Is this ok with everyone?
Thanks,
Chris
-- Christian Schwarz
Do you know [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED],
Debian GNU/Linux? [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Visit PGP-fp: 8F 61 EB 6D CF 23 CA D7 34 05 14 5C C8 DC 22 BA
http://www.debian.org http://fatman.mathematik.tu-muenchen.de/~schwarz/
