On Tue, 12 May 2026 at 10:25:30 +0200, Simon Josefsson wrote:
Can't anyone subscribe to the packages they are interested? Just click
'subscribe' button? What's the advantage of [email protected]?
The advantage of [email protected] is that it's obvious that sending
mail to [email protected] (or something that eventually reaches that
address, like bugs.debian.org) is the intended way to email the
maintainers, because it's the *only* way to contact the maintainers.
(Secondarily, it's also (more) explicit that subscribing to the package
on the PTS is the intended way to subscribe to package updates, because
it's the only way to subscribe.)
I am not interested in an avalanche of mails from which I am not
interested in 80 % of them.
I agree -- thus [email protected] doesn't seem ideal. But
some other magic e-mail address? It could even go to /dev/null.
If there's a magic email address that is the maintainer of these
packages, then well-intentioned contributors will look up that address
in the Packages file (or equivalent) and then send email to it,
and then not get any response from the maintainer-of-record, defeating
the purpose of declaring a maintainer email address.
On one hand, you could argue that those well-intentioned contributors
are simply wrong and should always have been using [email protected],
but on the other hand, there's a lot to be said for Rusty Russell's "How
Do I Make This Hard to Misuse?" (which was about kernel API design, but
the same principles can apply in many other places). If we aim to make the
obvious thing correct and/or make the wrong thing impossible, then we can
eliminate a whole category of mistakes.
We sometimes already see this in teams like GNOME, Python, Games where
there is basically nobody (perhaps literally nobody) subscribed to the
avalanche-of-mails mailing list, because instead, all maintainers are
subscribed to either the few packages that they personally "own" or have
touched recently (particularly in "loose" teams like Games and Python),
or the "team" group on the package tracking system if they do want the
full fire-hose experience.
smcv
