Simon Josefsson <[email protected]> writes: > As they are currently defined, I believe dropping Maintainer/Uploader > fields from the debian policy manual is the simplest improvement. > Or at least make them optional.
Well, I certainly don't think we should drop Maintainer. It seems obviously useful and we already have a convention (with a fair bit of tooling behind it) for what to put into that field if the package is orphaned. I'm not sure what we would gain by removing it. I am increasingly inclined to remove the requirement that Uploaders be present for team-maintained packages, though. My vague recollection is that the last time this came up, the FTP team raised the primary objections on the grounds that they needed someone specific to contact if there was a problem with a package. But I'm not sure this still makes sense (this was many years ago), and the correct contact point for nearly all purposes I can think of is indeed the team. Historically, there were objections that some team addresses had aggressive spam filtering and would reject messages about the package, but surely that's a problem we can deal with individually as it comes up. -- Russ Allbery ([email protected]) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
