Re: Maintainer: Debian Commons

Quoting Paul Gevers (2026-05-11 16:34:55)
> TL;DR: I declare weak ownership in my package by using "Debian Commons 
> <[email protected]>" as the maintainer and myself as uploader.
[...]
> 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.

Thanks a lot for introducing this.

What I particularly like about it, and find frustratingly ambiguous
with the "debian" namespace on Salsa, is that it explicitly goes beyond
NMU-ish activities.

For packages that I consider simple enough that anyone can apply not
only small changes but e.g. also a refactoring from dh to cdbs-ng and
upload without coordination, I will adopt this new scheme.

For packages where I want to encourage collaboration for _preparing_
uploads but where I expect the Uploaders field to indicate whom to
coordinate prior to uploading non-NMU-ish changes, I will move away
from the salsa "debian" namespace, as I consider the ambiguity of that
too problematic.

 - Jonas


¹ In my mind it is plain wrong, but I understand that interpretation is
no better than that of anyone else, so I have given up trying to argue
and consider moving a slew of packages *away* from the "debian"
namespace to avoid future surprises for pa what I expect is 

-- 
 * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
 * Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/
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