Maintainer: Debian Commons

Hi all,

TL;DR: I declare weak ownership in my package by using "Debian Commons 
<[email protected]>" as the maintainer and myself as uploader.

Yesterday I gave a lightning talk at MiniDebConf Hamburg 2026. The 
subject of the talk was Debian Commons. Someone suggested I posted here 
about the topic too.

Why
===

I'm doing this because:

* I wished Debian didn't have strong package ownership as default,
   because most/all my package don't require it
* I want to express that those packages have weak ownership if not team
   maintained
* For some of my packages I don't have an appropriate team
* I don't want my packages to be maintained by a single maintainer
* I don't know how to express all of the above since we lost the
   collab-maint group on Alioth and having my packages in the debian
   namespace on Salsa is unfortunately not as clear a message as I'd like
   it to be

How you can do the same
=======================

* Use Debian Commons <[email protected]> in the Maintainer
   field
* Use your own name in the Uploaders field (if you don't want that, you
   should probably orphan your package instead)
* Ensure you receive bug reports like usual when you're not in the
   Maintainer field
* (Somewhat optionally, but please) ensure the packaging git repository
   is in the debian namespace on Salsa.

DDPO shows all packages using Debian Commons together like here:
https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=viking%40packages.debian.org

Background (my view)
====================

Debian has a model of strong package ownership but often package 
maintainers don't want that for (some of) their packages. While the 
LowThresholdNmu process exists to declare that NMUs for ones packages 
are fine under rather wide conditions, DebianCommons is created to sit 
between LowThresholdNmu owned packaging and Orphaning. A package 
maintainer that uses the DebianCommons way of setting the Maintainer 
field probably considers themselves something like a shepherd of the 
package: they takes care of it in a low maintenance mode (occasional new 
upstream version upload and dealing with severe bugs) and they don't 
want to claim ownership.

WiKi
====

I bootstrapped a wiki page for this here: 
https://wiki.debian.org/DebianCommons

Paul

Credits for the name: paride coined the name at MiniDebConf Hamburg 
2026, claiming that paultag came up with it, I was using "be my guest" 
before.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
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==
=KTl5
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----