`Maintainer' field

[Daniel Robitaille]

On Tue, 2005-06-09 at 19:05 +0100, Ian Jackson wrote:

> 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.

I thought that decentralized approach of no package "ownership" was done
by design by the Ubuntu staff?  While I don't actually develop for
Ubuntu, from the outside it seems a logical approach considering the
very small group that deal with the many packages in the distro. 

> 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.

#ubuntu-devel seems the best one :)   Personally I find that you
discover pretty quickly who is doing what in the developers crowd simply
by looking at the changelogs, emails, and IRC chatter.

> 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.

wouldn't the same problem occur even if there were official Ubuntu
maintainers for specific packages?  People would still jump the queue
and talk to the Debian crowd directly; which I agree must be sometimes
annoying for them.

Daniel