[php-maint] Alioth group membership / git access

[Thomas Goirand]

On 10/18/2010 11:07 PM, John Morrissey wrote:
> Also, the only copyright notice in Net_DNS is for Eric Kilfoil
> <eric at ypass.net>. Those who have worked on the PEAR module are listed as
> "maintainers." Should I keep the single 'Upstream Authors' section in
> debian/copyright and list all of them

Yes, you should *always* list everyone. Don't care too much about what
you see in a copyright notice, as in general, people tend to forget code
that they grabbed. Have a look in every single source file, use
something like "grep -r -i \(c\) *" and such to make sure you see every
copyright in all files, etc.

YES, this can take a long long time. When packaging "xen-qemu-dm", I got
strongly criticized by the ftp-masters for not doing this work correctly
which potentially can lead to legal issues in Debian as a whole. Then I
spent 2 long days working fully on my debian/copyright, and got really
sick of it. It's really not a nice thing to do, but we have
unfortunately no choice. Please take a big care of it, I really wouldn't
like that the ftp-masters point at me for sponsoring a package without a
correct debian/copyright file, they would hate me (and have valid
reasons to do so), and potentially ask for my upload rights to be removed!!!

> or make some distinction between
> those listed as "maintainers" and those who have an explicit copyright
> notice?

If somebody is listed as "maintainer" but in a source file you see "(c)
whoever", then whoever is an author and has copyright holding. If you
see someone only listed as maintainer, and listed nowhere else, then it
might be reasonable to only list them as maintainer and that's it. In
case of doubts, ask upstream authors about it (it's always a good idea
to do so anyway). Also, even if you asked upstream, *do not trust 100%
what they say*. My experience (for example when packaging eXtplorer) is
that they often forget that they used this or that library.

> I left this as CDBS since the previous maintainer used it, since I imagined
> it was bad form to change the build system completely in the first upload
> after adopting.

I didn't have a look much on this package because it was a CDBS. Now I
had a quick look in your debian/changelog. IMHO, you should replace:

* New maintainer. (Closes: #529687)

by:

* Adopting package (Closes: #529687).

And because of it, you don't need:

* Remove Ola Lundqvist <opal at debian.org> as uploader, with his OK.

You should make one statement per modification, and it's obvious that if
you are adopting the package, you are now the maintainer (unless you put
the php-pkg as maintainer, and you as uploader).

> I'll get rid of CDBS and move it to debhelper.

This was *not* a requirement, it's just that I don't do CDBS stuff, and
that you would need somebody else to review it. You can switch to
debhelper *if you want* to do it. Also, as this will get uploaded to
experimental, I don't see it as an issue to change many things (as you
will have all the life of Squeeze to fix eventual issues).

The last time I checked on this php-services-weather, it was still CDBS
though.

Thomas