On Tue, 12 May 2026 at 15:09:08 +0200, Simon Josefsson wrote:
Simon McVittie <[email protected]> writes:
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.
That's not obvious to me - does anything in Debian Policy or
developers-reference explain that alias?
I'm not saying that it's (currently) obvious why a maintainer would
want to choose to put that address in the Maintainer field, which, yes,
is not well-documented.
What I was trying to imply is that **if** a maintainer has put
[email protected] in the Maintainer field, then avoidable mistakes are
avoided: from the point of view of a message sender, it no longer
matters whether I look up the Maintainer in the Packages file[1] or on
tracker.debian.org[1] or packages.debian.org[1], or whether I have
out-of-band knowledge that actually [email protected] is better[2],
because whichever of those routes I take, it will lead to me sending
email to [email protected], which already should end up reaching the
maintainer(s).
[1] often OK, but sometimes the wrong choice
[2] usually true, but not well-documented
I don't monitor that e-mail
alias for packages I help with, nor did I know that I should (or even
know how).
For packages for which your own email is in the Maintainer field (for
example libgfshare in my case, or gnulib in your case), email to
[email protected] will end up going to you because you're the
Maintainer. Various automated messages from the Debian infrastructure
use that mechanism to reach you: for example I think the messages that
say "gnulib migrated to testing" or "gnulib is going to be autoremoved
from testing" or "gnulib build failed on loong64" go that route?
For packages for which you are a contributor (or just interested) but
not listed as the Maintainer, if you subscribe to a package as described in
https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/developers-reference/pkgs.en.html#pkg-subscription,
then you'll receive emails sent to that alias as if you were the
Maintainer. This used to be a function of the Package Tracking System
(packages.qa.debian.org), and was later taken over by the Debian Package
Tracker (tracker.debian.org).
https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/developers-reference/pkgs.en.html#pkg-subscription
is currently phrased as "you can if you want" rather than "you should",
but perhaps it should be more like "you should", because co-maintenance
is very common (and increasingly so) [3], and co-maintainers usually
won't get bugmail or other automated messages unless they either subscribe
to "their" packages, or subscribe to a mailing list that is the
Maintainer - but if they subscribe to a mailing list Maintainer, then
they'll get all of those emails for the rest of the mailing list's
packages as well, which is not necessarily desirable for loose teams
with a lot of packages.
[3] https://trends.debian.net/#co-maintenance
Btw, the search function on https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ is
awful
Sorry, I'm not responsible for that search mechanism.
I believe the recommended way to reach maintainers of a package is
[email protected] with "Package: FOO" for that package. That's the
contact method that I monitor for "my" packages.
For bugs in your package, yes, but not every interaction with
maintainers is a bug report against your package. For example if I'm
reporting a bug in pkgconf or awk or something, which is related to how
a gnulib module uses it but is not actually a gnulib bug, I might
X-Debbugs-Cc: [email protected] to alert the maintainer(s) of gnulib that
it's a failure mode that they're likely to see again, or ask whether
they know a workaround, or similar.
Some non-bug interactions can be done by (mis?)representing them as bug
reports, but that isn't always appropriate, and in particular it wouldn't
work well for X-Debbugs-Cc.
smcv
