Well, I do not agree with all of Neil's comments, but I think I have something to say (since the discussion is so hot and long).
I'm just a maintainer. And I'm proud of that. I'm not (Neil knows) a DD nor want to be one, but I'm really proud of my help to Debian as a maintainer and as a translator. And even as an upstream, since I needed to become upstream for the package I maintain. As a maintainer, I have my own VCS (it's Subversion, for you to know if wanted), and all the releases I upload to mentors are really released in the VCS and webpage. Yes, some of them does not reach the Debian archive, but I do not care about that. People who download a deb instead of a tarball from the webpage or from the VCS have the right to have a bumped revision number when I change things in the packaging. And I have the right to check differences between revisions of the package in the VCS and to talk about them with my sponsor: "Hey, I did this and that there. What do you think of doing the same here?". To be honest, as not ll uploads to mentors reach the archive, not all the uploads of the archive reach the users. There are users of testing who normally update the systems once in a month, thus losing revisions. Do you think they care about numbers being not consecutive? They really don't. They just care for having good software, well packaged. The only two issues here, as I see, are the covenience of the sponsor to check changes and the problem of closing bugs which started the discussion. And the first is highly personal and variable and the second is perfectly solvable. Cheers (and thanks) to all Noel Torres er Envite
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