Summary

In February of 2006, a discussion and poll were held in the Debian community to determine the most appropriate way to handle the Maintainer field in package metadata for distributions derived from Debian.

Rationale

Debian maintainers have expressed discontent about the Maintainer field being unchanged in Ubuntu, because this causes them to be contacted in some situations where they are not the correct point of contact.

Use cases

Scope

Handling of the Maintainer field for source and binary packages in Ubuntu, modified and unmodified relative to Debian

Design

Debian maintainers were polled for their opinions on this subject. The ballot options were:

[   ] Choice 1: Maintainer field should remain unmodified
[   ] Choice 2: Change Maintainer on source changes only
[   ] Choice 3: Change Maintainer on any change (including binary rebuild)
[   ] Choice 4: Choice 3 + Preserve Maintainer: field as Debian-Maintainer:
[   ] Choice 5: I don't care
[   ] Choice 6: None of the above / Further discussion

The results showed that the voters preferred Choice 4. Therefore we will do as follows for all Ubuntu binary packages, and Ubuntu source packages which are modified relative to Debian:

Binary Packages

We will automatically mangle the headers during the package build process. AdamConrad has preliminary code for this.

Source Packages

If a source package is modified relative to Debian (this can be determined automatically by examining the version number), its Maintainer field should be updated either as above, or with a more appropriate Ubuntu contact if one exists. For all packages which are already modified at this time, we can automatically implement the changes. In the future, the field should be updated when modifying the package for the first time. We will provide a script to automate this and refer to it from UbuntuDevelopment (the script is now available as update-maintainer from the ubuntu-dev-tools package).

We will add a check to dpkg-buildpackage which refuses to build a source package if above conditions are not met and $DEBEMAIL contains ubuntu.

Implementation

Code

There is a script update-maintainer available in the ubuntu-dev-tools package, which automatically updates debian/control in a source package.

Data preservation and migration

Unresolved issues

Derivatives other than Ubuntu should adhere to the same standard, and Debian should generalize its statement to apply to all Derivatives, not only Ubuntu.

Tests

Previous rules

These rules were amended in May 2009. The previous rules modified the Maintainer field depending on the package's component:


CategorySpec
CategoryProcess

DebianMaintainerField (last edited 2010-02-05 15:33:10 by d86-33-158-1)