Hi Christian, & co, The foundational principle here is that the first-come has control of the indexing permissions, and thus who gets to release, and as a result, has control over what goes in releases.
Where a first-come is non-responsive, then a PAUSE admin can make a decision that they feel is in the best interests of (the users of) the distribution. If the first-come is active, then the admins have no right to overrule them, unless they feel they acted nefariously to gain the first-come permission in the first place. That doesn't appear to be the case here. In the interests of completeness, I'll also mention NOXFER, the special pseudo user which lets an author indicate that even if they're non responsive, they want the permissions to stand. Personally, I've always interpreted the author field in metadata as identifying the original author, so when I've adopted distributions I've left it as just the original author. But the spec says it "indicates the person(s) to contact concerning the distribution", and again, the first-come has the right to decide what goes in there. Given your history of contributions and releases, it would have been polite/respectful to discuss this with you, rather than act unilaterally. And it would be polite to list of all the contributors in the doc. Given the above, it sounds like releasing a differently named fork is your best option here. Neil
