What ever happened to the [EMAIL PROTECTED] concept? That would be ideal since the maintainers of a package could decide how to redirect that themselves and the easy access to the maintainer is still there. This also abstracts the maintainer from the package. I don't usually say "I'm having trouble with Bill's package", I usually say "I'm having trouble with kde ...". Sending mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] or [EMAIL PROTECTED] seems to make sense. Perhaps even a virtual domain dedicated to this like [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Anyway, Ian is right. The policy should reflect the way things actually are, and the sexy side tools should work with reality. As an aside, I don't see having an e-mail address that doesn't reflect the current ownership of a package as helping to better organize or manage the project (i.e. if a package has a team of five maintainers and only one is allowed to get email). In fact I think the maintainer field in a package has got little to do with change management at all. I would like to see this applied to the case cited in Chris's mail (the KBD project) to demonstrate how it would improve the overall effectiveness of that project. I can't come up with a scenario where it would. I think the management of this project is a separate issue, but there should be a mechanism by which any arbitrary maintainer could "plug themself in" to the debian process. Then the maintainer side of management could be a free for all, provided the interface requirements are met (e.g. adhering to the current standards as described in the policy manual). I think the time for downloading someone else's code, running debmake, and calling it a package need to come to an end and more care (and probably more work) needs to get put into each package (to get it to conform to some interoperability spec or some such, perhaps just the policy manual). Since debian is based soley on free software, there shouldn't be any licensing issues to worry about with regard to this. The recent effort Jay started regarding a comprehensive standards test suite would be extremely beneficial in this regard. Better tools to help get to the point of conformance would be good as well. I think that getting into "maintainer management" is something debian should avoid. It doesn't seem to have much to do with this email address issue either, unless I've missed something. P.S. The current developer's documentation is 100 fold better than it was a year ago. Cheers, Richard
