[DRE-maint] Moving away from uploaders.mk

[Gunnar Wolf]

[  back from VAC - That's why I'm resurrecting this old thread. I hope
   I'm still in time to influence it ]

Lucas Nussbaum dijo [Fri, Feb 02, 2007 at 10:18:54PM +0100]:
> I think that we should move away from the Uploaders rule. As discussed
> in this thread in debian-devel[0], it is clearly not the best
> organization. This scheme matches our organization the best:
> 
>  Maintainer: the main person responsible for the package
>  Uploaders: team address + other members willing to help with this
>     package

Yes... Shame, the pkg-ruby-extras way looked quite nice for me - In
fact, I was pushing for pkg-perl to go that way [1] :)

Anwyay, I'd like to suggest pkg-perl's way: 'Maintainer' is not used
to list an individual, but the group address. When a bug is reported
against any pkg-perl maintained package, it gets sent to one of our
mailing lists. Of course, I'm listed as the uploader for the packages
I have touched and worked with.

Why putting team as the maintainer instead of as an uploader? First,
because the team address is completely virtual - there is no single
human behind it, and it just cannot ever produce an upload (or so I
hope, at least ;-) ). Second, because the very essence of team
maintainership is to kill feuds, to undo the "this is mine precious
package" culture. Any team member is welcome to work on any of the
packages - Of course, inside the team and as an inter-human thing, we
can split responsabilities and keep track of who's the guy who cares
about libfoo-ruby... But the package metadata does not need to reflect
it. 

> (...)
> I propose the following procedure to change this:
> 
> 1/ Every package is modified in svn, to:
>    * no longer include uploaders.mk
>    * no longer use control.in
>    * modify Uploaders to only include the team address

I love to get rid of control.in ;-)

> 2/ Before a deadline (2 weeks ?) every member of the team add himself to
> the Uploaders field of every package he cares about.

Umh... If the maintainer is set to the team mailing list (we could
create a second mailing list, mandatory for team members, to receive
bug reports - Or they can just come to this list? What do you think?),
we will all get the bug reports. I hope there is not a terrible flurry
of reports coming in at any given time to get us all too tired ;-)

> 3/ All packages are uploaded again, if another version is not going to
> be uploaded very soon.

Umh... I'd like to avoid this step, to just fix them as we upload
them. It's just noise. But that's _my_ personal preference.

> 4/ Eventually, we will remove uploaders.mk.

Yay! Hopefully, this will be quickish. The group does not have that
many packages yet :)

[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-perl/2007/01/msg00005.html

-- 
Gunnar Wolf - gwolf at gwolf.org - (+52-55)5623-0154 / 1451-2244
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