[csw-maintainers] Non-Maintainer Uploads (NMUs)

[Maciej (Matchek) Bliziński]

2013/8/11 Peter FELECAN <pfelecan at opencsw.org>:
>>>> 1. When you upload a package, you become the package owner/maintainer.
>>>
>>> The systematic of this association is what's annoying me.
>>
>> I think it should be named for what it is: who last uploaded the
>> package. This is a useful piece of information and we should not
>> inhibit it.
>
> So, we must have another information which is the uploader, displayed on
> our web infrastructure. Cannot be taken from the user name of who's
> running csw-upload-pkg?

I tried and failed. I wanted to record who uploaded which package to
which catalog. Unfortunately, our web proxy destroys this information.
Maybe it can be fixed with some clever HTTP header rewriting, but I
didn't manage to make it work.

>>>> 2. A package owner/maintainer is responsible for everything that's
>>>> associated with the package, e.g. any current and future bugs.
>>>
>>> This is not axiomatic and is what I wish to reasonably relax.
>>
>> Cool. We'll probably find a middle ground. A lot of that expectation
>> revolves around wording used on our website.
>
> As said above, we should add the information of the user having done the
> NMU but keep the mantis ownership of the project.

The NMU setting could be a parameter for mgar invocation. Based on
this, the appropriate details would be built into pkginfo, and then
read by the infrastructure. I don't see any other sane way of
implementing this.

Instead of one EMAIL setting, we need two: package maintainer and
package builder. (You cannot enclose the uploader information, because
it's unknown until the upload.)

You could invoke mgar with a flag indicating you don't want to be the
owner. mgar can look into the buildfarm database to figure out who's
the current maintainer of that package. Of course, we need to think
what to do if there are discrepancies, e.g. different maintainers for
5.9, 5.10, 5.11, intel and sparc.

Or maybe we could make that (no ownership change) the default and make
the ownership change a special flag.

Maciej