Helps if I send this to the correct bug.
Russ Allbery <r...@debian.org> writes:
> * maintainer-name-missing and uploader-name-missing are both automatic
> rejects in the ftp-master checks, which makes them automatically
> severity: serious in Lintian. That's not the specific one that you're
> asking about, but that's the rule that Changed-By references.
> * The Policy description for Changed-By says "The name and email address
> of the person who changed the said package." That's not a should.
> That's a statement of what that field shall include, which means that if
> it doesn't have the name and e-mail address, it's a syntax error and
> therefore is a violation of an implicit must.
> I see where your reading is coming from, but suspect the best fix is to
> just change the Policy wording to make it clear that this is a must.
> There's really no reason to use a different format, and Debian elsewhere
> already requires names.
Here's a proposed patch that cleans up the wording of Maintainer,
Uploaders, and Changed-By to reflect current practice. There is another
outstanding bug in this area to document further restrictions on
Maintainer and Uploaders, but this is the easy part so I wanted to resolve
this first.
The following patch tightens the syntax of Maintainer to a must, tightens
the use of comma as a separator in Uploaders to a must, permits people to
use multi-line Uploaders fields (we were waiting for the lenny release),
and is explicit that the syntax of Changed-By is the same as Maintainer
and is a bit clearer about what goes into that field.
Objections or seconds?
diff --git a/policy.sgml b/policy.sgml
index df6ae89..5a76cf3 100644
--- a/policy.sgml
+++ b/policy.sgml
@@ -2672,7 +2672,7 @@ Package: libc6
<p>
The package maintainer's name and email address. The name
- should come first, then the email address inside angle
+ must come first, then the email address inside angle
brackets <tt><></tt> (in RFC822 format).
</p>
@@ -2690,17 +2690,16 @@ Package: libc6
<sect1 id="f-Uploaders">
<heading><tt>Uploaders</tt></heading>
- <p>
- List of the names and email addresses of co-maintainers of
- the package, if any. If the package has other maintainers
- beside the one named in the
- <qref id="f-Maintainer">Maintainer field</qref>, their
- names and email addresses should be listed here. The
- format is the same as that of the Maintainer tag, and
- multiple entries should be comma separated. Currently,
- this field is restricted to a single line of data. This
- is an optional field.
- </p>
+ <p>
+ List of the names and email addresses of co-maintainers of
+ the package, if any. If the package has other maintainers
+ beside the one named in the
+ <qref id="f-Maintainer">Maintainer field</qref>, their names
+ and email addresses should be listed here. The format is the
+ same as that of the Maintainer tag, and multiple entries must
+ be comma separated. This is an optional field.
+ </p>
+
<p>
Any parser that interprets the Uploaders field in
<file>debian/control</file> must permit it to span multiple
@@ -2714,9 +2713,10 @@ Package: libc6
<heading><tt>Changed-By</tt></heading>
<p>
- The name and email address of the person who changed the
- said package. Usually the name of the maintainer.
- All the rules for the Maintainer field apply here, too.
+ The name and email address of the person who prepared this
+ version of the package, usually a maintainer. The syntax is
+ the same as for the <qref id="f-Maintainer">Maintainer
+ field</qref>.
</p>
</sect1>
--
Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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