The purpose of the ‘Maintainer’ field is to provide a contact address for the users of the software. But for some projects, the primary corresondance address is not necessarly the developer's email address. It can be a helpdesk, or a mailing list shared by multiple projects. In some rare cases, the users may be asked to use other communication media than email, for instance web forms.
I propose to rename the ‘Maintainer’ field ‘Contact’, to reflect that the address is not necessarly the one of a person, and to clarify the purpose of this field, which is to inform where to send messages, not to document whose contributors we think are maintainers the maintainers (which for complex projects can be a very difficult exercise where the errors can frustrate people). http://lists.debian.org/[email protected] I would like to apologise to the Debian community for not having discussed this change in public before commiting it. Given that not all the subscribers of debian-project and debian-devel are interested in DEP-5, I just wanted to reduce the traffic and not bother people wiht minor changes. It was not my intention to impose my point of view over the opinion of other people. Later this year, I proposed again to rename the ‘Maintainer’ field ‘Contact’, and it was not objected. http://lists.debian.org/[email protected] I use the Contact field instead of the Maintainer field for my packages, and nobody commented about, and they passed through the NEW queue. I therefore think, in my humble opinion, that the attached patch is consensual and could be applied. This patch also modifies an example, where the Contact adress becomes a mailing list. Cheers, -- Charles Plessy Debian Med packaging team, http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan
>From 0ce807026f9776e3e87ebca6c634199a5eb6e4aa Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Charles Plessy <[email protected]> Date: Sat, 14 Aug 2010 12:29:10 +0900 Subject: [PATCH] =?UTF-8?q?=20#=20Renaming=20the=20=E2=80=98Maintainer=E2=80=99=20field=20=E2=80=98Contact=E2=80=99.?= MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit --- dep5.mdwn | 8 ++++---- 1 files changed, 4 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-) diff --git a/dep5.mdwn b/dep5.mdwn index 152ff69..7244969 100644 --- a/dep5.mdwn +++ b/dep5.mdwn @@ -86,7 +86,7 @@ line is pending in [bug 491302](http://bugs.debian.org/491302). * Single occurrence * Syntax: Single line (in most cases a single word), containing the name of the software. - * **`Maintainer`** + * **`Contact`** * Optional * Single occurrence * Syntax: Line(s) containing the preferred address(es) to reach current upstream maintainer(s). May be free-form text, but by convention will usually be written as a list of RFC2822 addresses or URIs. @@ -105,12 +105,12 @@ Examples: Format-Specification: http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/dep/web/deps/dep5.mdwn?op=file&rev=135 Name: SOFTware - Maintainer: John Doe <[email protected]> + Contact: John Doe <[email protected]> Source: http://www.example.com/software/project Format-Specification: http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/dep/web/deps/dep5.mdwn?op=file&rev=135 Name: xyz - Maintainer: Jane Smith <[email protected]> + Contact: The XYX developing team <[email protected]> Source: http://www.example.com/gitwww ### Files Section (Repeatable) @@ -481,7 +481,7 @@ Debian source package `planet-venus`: Format-Specification: http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/dep/web/deps/dep5.mdwn?op=file&rev=135 Name: Planet Venus - Maintainer: John Doe <[email protected]> + Contact: John Doe <[email protected]> Source: http://www.example.com/code/venus Copyright: 2008, John Doe <[email protected]> -- 1.6.5.7
