[Utnubu-discuss] Utnubu and collaborative maintenance with Ubuntu MOTU

Floris Bruynooghe fb102 at soton.ac.uk
Tue Jan 17 14:09:27 UTC 2006


On Tue, Jan 17, 2006 at 02:25:05PM +0100, Stephan Hermann wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Tuesday 17 January 2006 13:24, Floris Bruynooghe wrote:
> > > "
> > > the objection I have is only to change the responsibilities of the core
> > > motu team.
> > > In my POV the core MOTU team can't be the maintainer (if this is decided
> > > somehow), because the responsibilities right now are Ubuntu, and not
> > > fixing bugs in packages coming from ubuntu but running on debian.
> >
> > This is imho exactly the reason why Joey wrote his email (admittingly
> > it was written a bit rude).  He does not want to be bothered with bugs
> > from a modified version of his software.  Recompiling and linking
> > against a different library is the same as modifying.  So for the same
> > reason MOTU team can't be maintainer in Debian, Joey or any other DD
> > can't be maintainer in Ubuntu by default.  And the full rationale you
> 
> Which is ok, imho, if we would use the maintainer field. But neither the 
> Maintainer field nor the Uploaders field is technically used in Ubuntu. 
> A bug report address is added to the package description automatically for 
> binary packages, too.
> 
> So, thinking about the usual user, who can use synaptic or adept, but don't 
> see the Maintainer via apt-cache or don't care about the maintainer, who is 
> seeing this as "Joey Hess is maintaining the packages in Ubuntu"? 

But the field is still there and may lead to confusion for people
(just like it did to me just now!).  If you add a field (the bug
report address), why can you not delete the maintainer and uploaders
field?  That would remove the discussions at all and do no harm since
they're not used at all.

> How many mails he got during the last 3 releases for packages of him in 
> ubuntu?

Not me to answer, but I can understand his objection/concern.  Maybe
it is because he is also confused about the use of the field in
ubuntu, but leaving the field there suggests to most people that it is
of some importance.

I must admit that I do not know the technical implications of removing
a field, it may require patches to dpkg etc which would be an argument
not to do so.  But leaving it unmodified obviously creates confusion.

Regards
Floris

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