ubuntu-standard: Listed package maintainers often highly rude (incorrect listed maintainers)

[sam at vilain.net]

Package: ubuntu-standard
Version: 0.80
Severity: grave
Justification: renders package unusable

Hi there,

Firstly, apologies for raising this quasi-social issue as a grave bug
against the base system, but I believe this is an issue which impacts
on the usability of Ubuntu proper, that should be fixed before the
next release.  My apologies if I could not find the previous
discussion of this issue, which I presume must exist somewhere.

If you report a bug in a package to the maintainer of the package,
they frequently turn around and say - often endeavouring to be as
terse and rude as possible, as certain other distribution's
maintainers are wont to do - that they do not support bugs in Ubuntu.

I suspect there is no hard and fast rule here, and that some package
maintainers welcome the opportunity for the cross-pollenation of the
user base between dpkg-based distributions, but obviously a
considerable number of them are still wound up on their sour grapes
that Ubuntu exists in the first place.

Anyway, enough spiel - what I perceive to the be problem is that the
"maintainer" field of imported packages is often left as-is, which is
incorrect when the package has been modified by the Ubuntu project.
So, something needs to be done en masse to rectify this situation.

I'm thinking of an e-mail sent out automatically to maintainers of
newly included packages (as well as a batch sent out to existing
packages), which asks the author to confirm that they are indeed the
true maintainer of the package and want to have their address listed
on there, and therefore receive bug reports from Ubuntu users.

Yes, I know about launchpad, but not all packages track their faults
this way, and I'm having difficulty seeing where you would log a bug
in the, eg, Ubuntu's udev package. (case in point, a critical bug,
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-users/2006-March/069624.html)

Perhaps it is even worth setting up 'proxy' e-mail addresses for
package maintainers, or if this really has shifted to being a group
responsibility, just set them all to be the appropriate mailing list.

Sam.