`Maintainer' field

[Daniel Stone]

On Tue, 2005-09-06 at 21:02 +0100, Colin Watson 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.

I've almost always found the changelog to be pretty sufficient for this.

For instance, looking at d-i changelogs, you'll find that Colin's our
installer dude; looking at xorg changelogs, you'll pretty quickly work
out that I'm the xorg maintainer, but Adam probably knows his way around
the library dependency chain by now, and Matt has a fair idea of the
Debconf scripting, et al.