`Maintainer' field

[Colin Watson]

On Tue, Sep 06, 2005 at 07:05:17PM +0100, Ian Jackson wrote:
> 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.

As a stopgap measure, I've written this wiki page:

  https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MaintainerContacts

... with various suggestions for getting in touch with appropriate
people. It links to a list of Bugzilla's idea of the initial owner for
bugs filed against packages, updated hourly:

  http://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/~cjwatson/Maintainers

> 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.

I think we ought to be a little careful about making the packaging
toolchain behave differently on Ubuntu from the way it behaves on
Debian, since it would probably cause confusion for people building
third-party packages (even source packages) on one for use on the other.
I'd be inclined to suggest using the override file instead so that we
can override maintainer fields even for packages that we sync unmodified
from Debian.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]