Hi all,TL;DR: I declare weak ownership in my package by using "Debian Commons <[email protected]>" as the maintainer and myself as uploader.
Yesterday I gave a lightning talk at MiniDebConf Hamburg 2026. The subject of the talk was Debian Commons. Someone suggested I posted here about the topic too.
Why === I'm doing this because: * I wished Debian didn't have strong package ownership as default, because most/all my package don't require it * I want to express that those packages have weak ownership if not team maintained * For some of my packages I don't have an appropriate team * I don't want my packages to be maintained by a single maintainer * I don't know how to express all of the above since we lost the collab-maint group on Alioth and having my packages in the debian namespace on Salsa is unfortunately not as clear a message as I'd like it to be How you can do the same ======================= * Use Debian Commons <[email protected]> in the Maintainer field * Use your own name in the Uploaders field (if you don't want that, you should probably orphan your package instead) * Ensure you receive bug reports like usual when you're not in the Maintainer field * (Somewhat optionally, but please) ensure the packaging git repository is in the debian namespace on Salsa. DDPO shows all packages using Debian Commons together like here: https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=viking%40packages.debian.org Background (my view) ====================Debian has a model of strong package ownership but often package maintainers don't want that for (some of) their packages. While the LowThresholdNmu process exists to declare that NMUs for ones packages are fine under rather wide conditions, DebianCommons is created to sit between LowThresholdNmu owned packaging and Orphaning. A package maintainer that uses the DebianCommons way of setting the Maintainer field probably considers themselves something like a shepherd of the package: they takes care of it in a low maintenance mode (occasional new upstream version upload and dealing with severe bugs) and they don't want to claim ownership.
WiKi ====I bootstrapped a wiki page for this here: https://wiki.debian.org/DebianCommons
PaulCredits for the name: paride coined the name at MiniDebConf Hamburg 2026, claiming that paultag came up with it, I was using "be my guest" before.
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