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

[Maciej (Matchek) Bliziński]

2013/4/9 Yann Rouillard <yann at pleiades.fr.eu.org>:
>> Debian packages track package's changelog, so you have a more accurate
>> view of what was happening.
>
> Yeah definitely, but it should not so complicated for us to do the same
> thing (in fact, some maintainers already manually maintain a changelog like
> the Debian one).

In Debian, the changelog is used for a lot of things. Even the version
of the package you're building, is taken from the changelog; the
software version isn't stored anywhere else, changelog is the
authoritative source.

Looking at the Debian package page...

http://packages.debian.org/unstable/database/mysql-server-5.5

...it lists multiple maintainers. For a package such as MySQL, it
makes complete sense. I don't know the internals, but I'm pretty sure
that the list of maintainer is kept as a separate entity from the
changelog. I would be all for copying their way of managing this.
Maybe we could even adapt their tools.

The question is, who will implement the changes. I'm currently working
on restoring buildfarm functionality, I can't take on more or nothing
will get done.

>> > I am rather for reverting back "last uploaded by" to "maintained by" and
>> > doing NMU without changing the maintainer, and eventually add the last
>> > uploader information somewhere.
>>
>> The thing I'm trying to say is that we don't store the information who
>> the maintainer is. In practice, we only store information who last
>> uploaded it. This is how it works in practice, and this is how we
>> should treat information. This leads to imperfections such as the QA
>> page listing the last uploader, but it's simply because we don't have
>> the information who the long-term owner of the package is (or if there
>> is one at all).
>>
>> So in my opinion we have the last uploader information available, and
>> what we need to do, is adding the maintainer field.
>
>
> Ok, eventually the result is the same we will have both information. That's
> fine for me.

Cool.

>> > So let's agree on the fake maintainer name and the mailing list !
>> >     "Orphanage Caretaker team", "Orphaned package", ... ?
>> >     orphanage at list.opencsw.org ?
>> >    (hmm, I am not very inspired here).
>>
>> Maybe even an existing mailing list such as 'devel' or 'pkgrequests'.
>> I would be hesitant to set this to 'maintainers' because of spam
>> potential (?).
>
>
> I don't think all maintainers are interested in co-maintaing orphaned
> package even in best effort mode, so I agree that it's best not to use
> 'maintainers'.

Looking at the existing lists:
https://lists.opencsw.org/mailman/listinfo

Maybe pkgrequests would be best? If someone is making an inquiry about
an orphaned package, it's very similar to someone making an inquiry to
add something to our catalog - for us it means potentially starting to
maintain a package we haven't been maintaining.

Maciej