`Maintainer' field

[Ian Jackson]

I've been working full-time on Ubuntu for a little over two weeks now
and there is one thing that I've found is consistently making it much
harder to get things done:

There is no straightforward way find out who the best person is to
contact about any particular package, and to get in touch with them.
The best available approaches are, it seems, to read the
debian/changelog to try to spot frequent contributors and to witter on
IRC (guess the channel!) and hope someone notices.

Also, I know that some Debian maintainers have become annoyed -
justifiably so, IMO - at being emailed by Ubuntu users with problems
with Ubuntu-patched versions of packages.

Both of these problems could be helped if we made a habit of putting
our details in the relevant Maintainer fields.  At the very least, for
those packages where our source differs from the Debian source and
where we aim to have some internal continuity amongst Ubuntu
developers, our details should be in the source and binary packages'
Maintainer fields - that is, in the .dsc and the .deb.

To avoid hiding the Debian maintainer (thus appearing to elide them
from the history of the work on the package, and cutting them out of
the communications) we should rename the original Maintainer field of
course, rather than deleting it.

If we decide we want to do this it should not be that difficult to to
this automatically.  For example, dpkg-buildpackage could rewrite
debian/control immediately before building the .dsc.

Ian.