On Sat, Dec 3, 2016 at 6:20 AM, Raphael Hertzog wrote: > We could get rid of "Maintainer" in debian/control and still display > on tracker.debian.org the name of people who are uploading/committing > in a dynamic "Maintainer" section. > > Actually, this is part of my grand-plan... :-) aka > http://dep.debian.net/deps/dep2/
I'd like to reframe this discussion a little bit... What exactly is the Maintainer* field for? Initially it was a way for individuals to declare their commitment to perform all tasks in relation to a package. Today, as well as being conflated with package ownership, I feel that it does not sufficiently represent the reality of individual commitments towards actions needed for packages, for Maintainers/Uploaders, the Debian packaging community in general and other people. I would like to see Maintainer/Uploaders replaced with some sort of fine-grained commitment registration system: I commit to spending 3 hours per week on $package. I commit to triaging bugs on $package. I commit to working on RC bugs on $package. I commit to testing proposed security updates on $package. I commit to testing alpha versions of $package. I commit to reviewing changes to $package. I commit to sponsoring non-member updates to $package. * and why did we make the huge mistake of not calling it Maintainers and then making the secondary mistake of introducing Uploaders instead of renaming it to Maintainers. -- bye, pabs https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
