[csw-maintainers] NMUs, non-maintainer uploads (was: reminder on contributing on recipes)

[Yann Rouillard]

2013/4/9 Maciej (Matchek) Bliziński <maciej at opencsw.org>
>
> 2013/4/8 Yann Rouillard <yann at pleiades.fr.eu.org>:
> > I think there are two topics here:
> >  1. how to handle NMU,
> >  2. how to handle orphaned packages.
> >
> > If you have a lot of bugs assigned to you, it's probably because the
> > maintainers are not active anymore and didn't upload new packages. In
fact,
> > the packages are rather orphaned.
> >
> > For 2., I would propose to create a dedicated fake maintainer. The
emails
> > address of this fake maintainer would be a mailing-list, all interested
> > maintainers in helping to keep orphaned package up to date would be
> > subscribed to this list.
> >
> > For 1., it might be better to register the official maintainer somewhere
> > (the easiest is in the Makefile). If someone else uploads a package it
could
> > just add an "UPLOADER" field in the pkginfo file but would not change
the
> > official maintainer of the package.
>
> Our current field has exactly this meaning, it's whomever last
> uploaded the package.

This has not been the case from the beginning, has it ?
That is not entirely clear from the outside I think: the maintainers pages
still mentions "packages maintained by" and not "packages last uploaded
by": http://www.opencsw.org/maintainers/yann/

And the email contact in the pkginfo file is the last uploader's one and
not the maintainer's one.

>
> There's also 2 things we need to distinguish:
>
> - how we can change our infrastructure to be better
> - what we can do right now
>
> I'm more interested in what we can do now, without changing our
> infrastructure. For now we have just one field; adjusting this field
> causes packages to look as if they changed ownership, although the
> field really only means the last uploader. So what do we do with this
> field for now?

Without changing anything, I think this field should be used for the
official maintainer. When we do a NMU we make sure this field doesn't
change.
Using a fake maintainer without changing anything in the current
infrastructure has to drawbacks I think:
  - from the outside, it will look like the package doesn't have a
maintainer anymore,
  - the real maintainer will not receive anymore bugs and reminders about
his package.

Of course we should contact the maintainer before doing this kind of upload.

Yann
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.opencsw.org/pipermail/maintainers/attachments/20130409/b6502975/attachment.html>