`Maintainer' field

Paul M Edwards pauledwards at gmail.com
Tue Sep 6 18:18:28 CDT 2005


It would certainly be appreciated by persons trying to fix certain
problems on their systems.

I recently experienced a problem with the ATI binary driver on Hoary
and wanted to talk to the packager about it... I proceeded to email
the individual indicated in the package details I saw in Synaptic. He
very kindly replied saying that he is the maintainer of the Debian
package and that I'd need to contact someone at Ubuntu about the
problem. We emailed back and forth a bit and he said he gets several
of those emails daily! I was and still am suprised at his patience and
kindness; if it were me I might be rather frustrated by now.

I think that something should be done about this and that using the
override fields seems like a good idea.

Paul



On 9/6/05, Colin Watson <cjwatson at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 06, 2005 at 12:48:18PM -0700, Daniel Robitaille wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> It's true that we don't have a Big Maintainer Lock on packages by
> design, so that we don't run into quite so much trouble when people go
> on holiday or whatever. On the other hand, having a list of people who
> know stuff about packages (think "expert" rather than "maintainer" if
> you like) is extraordinarily useful when you've run into a problem while
> working on a package and need some help.
> 
> We should be careful to distinguish the two roles of "gateway to
> uploads" and "expert".
> 
> > > 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.
> 
> All the same, I think a bit more organisation might not go amiss.
> 
> --
> Colin Watson



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