The Wanderer writes ("Re: problems in gjots2 and Debian"): > On 2018-04-18 at 05:55, Andrey Rahmatullin wrote: > > But that didn't happen, unless you put different meaning into > > Maintainer and Uploaders. > > If you don't assign different meanings to "Maintainer:" and > "Uploaders:", what's the point in both fields existing?
A very long time ago I foolishly wrote down that the payload of the Maintainer field might only contain one name and address. (I wrote that the Maintainer field was in RFC822 recipient field syntax.) Some people foolishly and noncompliantly uploaded packages where the "phrase" part of their name contained a comma. Defensive tooling which would detect or reject syntactically invalid packages was not yet written then. Instead, tools grew to tolerate commas here rather than treat them as separators (because they would mishandle the erroneous packages). When people decided that multiple maintainers were a good idea they invented a new field name Uploaders, because changing all the existing tools' understanding of Maintainer was too much work (politically and technically). We have been teaching all tools about Uploaders since. Nowadays this mess is entangled with the arguments about whether maintainership data ought to be primarily recorded in the source package at all. No-one has managed to get consensus to fix it. Ian.