Jonas Smedegaard <[email protected]> writes: > Quoting Sebastiaan Couwenberg (2026-08-15 11:07:03) >> On 8/15/26 10:25 AM, Tobias Frost wrote: >> > But this is not just an MIA team task. The Uploaders field is part of >> > the package's maintenance metadata, and keeping it reasonably accurate >> > should be part of maintaining the package. If you notice that someone >> > listed there no longer appears to be actively maintaining the package, >> > please consider cleaning it up. >> >> This will result in no-human-maintainers lintian issues, because >> many packages are on life support with team uploads where no person >> wants to commit to the package by adding themselves to Uploaders. >> >> I guess we should just acknowledge that fact in the override comment. > > If noone in a team wants to commit to a package by adding themselves as > in the Uploaders field, it seems that package is team-*un*maintained > and that fact should be acknowledged by moving the package to QA team.
I disagree -- and think this is at the core of what proper "team" maintainance of packages could be. To me, team maintainance would be one where the team as a collective take responsibility for a package, but no individual person insists on the ego-boost of assigning personal ownership of the outcome, and through social means of the Uploader field signal that others should not feel the same level of ownership. I think this social signal related to the Maintainer/Uploaders field is detrimental to a harmonous team spirit in the long run. It establish personal ownership and excludes others from feeling empowered to work on the package, even though they are part of the same team, or if they are a Debian Developer (which we would prefer to behave like a team). I believe many Go packages in Debian has this property. Few people doing work on each of the dependent Go package cares about that particular package strongly enough to insist that they have to must a say in the packaging of it. This is true for all the packages I help work on, at least. Thus, by getting rid of the Maintainer/Uploader fields, I believe we could get a better collective long-term outcome for packages. All packages are collectively maintained by "Debian Developers", for which we have a process for. Yes, there will be local "accidents" where this leads to bad mistakes in packages by people not familiar enough with a package. This will be used as an argument against this concept, and against the people doing those mistakes. I don't think it is a valid argument. It is an argument for improving QA tooling, documentation, and collaboration processes. Not for excluding people to contribute, and further cementing the current situation. We have some teams in Debian that operate like this, at least to me as an outsider. The release team, security team, and the DFSG team generate artifacts that may sometime have personal names associated with them (like security announcements), but it always feel like a group effort rather than a personal effort. I'm not sure people inside these teams feel the same, but at least that's the perception I get from an outside perspective. I think that is a sign of maturity and health. /Simon
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