On Thu, 21 Aug 2025 at 11:22:57 +0200, Simon Josefsson wrote:
Uploaders: Debian <debian-devel@lists.debian.org>
I think *this* (Uploaders, not Maintainer!) would be a good way to spell
"anyone can do a 'Team upload' of this package" without generating a lot
of extra email to debian-devel.
Maintainer: Debian <debian-devel@lists.debian.org>
I don't think we want every bug report against every
collectively-maintained package to be sent to every subscriber of
debian-devel, which is primarily a discussion list.
A package-specific address like PACKAGENAME at tracker.debian.org would
seem better to me; or maybe debian-qa (which is already a high-traffic
list that gets bug reports against orphaned packages), or a new list,
but I think those options are actually both worse than a
package-specific address.
The reason I think that is because Debian contributors, infrastructure
components, and third parties sometimes send email to the Maintainer
address when the intention is to contact "the responsible person or
responsible people, whoever they might be". With a package-specific
Maintainer address that forwards to the package's subscribers, anyone
interested in the package can easily subscribe to its address and get
all of its email, without being overwhelmed by messages that refer to
unrelated collectively-maintained packages.
If the Maintainer field is set to debian-qa or a new list, then I think
the most likely outcome is that it's essentially write-only, with emails
sent to it never reaching the de facto maintainer(s). This already
happens for large teams, and as a result I think that sending email to
the Maintainer is actually already an anti-pattern: for many larger
teams the result is that the email is delivered to a write-only
high-traffic list that is shared by a large package ecosystem, and will
never be read by most of the actual uploaders. For example maintainers
of games are likely to be subscribed to the debian-devel-games
discussion list and to their own game's tracker.debian.org address, but
unlikely to be subscribed to the pkg-games-devel firehose that gets the
"maintainer" email for all games: just because I co-maintain openarena,
that doesn't mean that messages about supertuxkart, a game I have never
contributed to, are of any interest or relevance to me.
I think that instead, anyone wanting to send notifications to "the
responsible person" should always be contacting the package's
tracker.debian.org or packages.debian.org address, which are something
that we *do* expect uploaders to subscribe to, on a per-team and/or
per-package basis. For example when we reassign bugs, the social
convention is to Cc the target package's packages.debian.org address.
But then that prompts the obvious question, "then what is the point of
the Maintainer field having an email address, if messages sent to that
address will often go unread?", and I don't see a good answer to that.
If the Maintainer field for collectively-maintained packages and large
and/or loose teams was systematically set to its package-specific
tracker.debian.org or packages.debian.org address, with Uploaders and
other interested parties asked to subscribe to that address, then that
would restore the usefulness of that address as a point of contact for
package-specific queries and notifications.
Using those addresses would break the ability to collect the equivalence
class of packages "owned" by a team by grouping packages into buckets
according to their Maintainer address, but I think we cannot have it
both ways: the Maintainer field cannot be both an appropriate address
for messages that will reliably reach the (most-)responsible person for
a particular package, and also a classifier to divide packages into
buckets according to the team that "owns" them, unless we demand that
every member of every team is subscribed to the fire-hose that
aggregates every message about every team-owned package (which I think
would just discourage contributors from joining large/loose teams, which
is the opposite of what we want).
Instead, I think that putting the team address in Uploaders would be a
better way to collect packages into buckets for the purposes of services
like DMD. For example, openarena could have:
Maintainer: Debian Games Team <openar...@tracker.debian.org>
Uploaders: Debian Games Team <pkg-games-de...@lists.alioth.debian.org>,
Simon McVittie <s...@debian.org>,
(etc.)
and it would still show up on
https://udd.debian.org/dmd/?email1=pkg-games-de...@lists.alioth.debian.org
just as well as it does now - but messages sent to the Maintainer of
record would start reaching the subscribers (like me), which right now
they do not.
smcv
