Re: Maintainer: Debian Commons

Simon Josefsson <[email protected]> Tue, 12 May 2026 15:09:08 +0200
Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.general
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
Simon McVittie <[email protected]> writes:

> On Tue, 12 May 2026 at 10:25:30 +0200, Simon Josefsson wrote:
>>Can't anyone subscribe to the packages they are interested?  Just click
>>'subscribe' button?  What's the advantage of [email protected]?
>
> The advantage of [email protected] is that it's obvious that sending
> mail to [email protected] (or something that eventually reaches that
> address, like bugs.debian.org) is the intended way to email the
> maintainers, because it's the *only* way to contact the maintainers.

That's not obvious to me - does anything in Debian Policy or
developers-reference explain that alias?  I don't monitor that e-mail
alias for packages I help with, nor did I know that I should (or even
know how).

Btw, the search function on https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ is
awful, how do I search for a simple string like "packages.debian.org" in
debian-policy or developers-reference?

I believe the recommended way to reach maintainers of a package is
[email protected] with "Package: FOO" for that package.  That's the
contact method that I monitor for "my" packages.

/Simon

> (Secondarily, it's also (more) explicit that subscribing to the
> package on the PTS is the intended way to subscribe to package
> updates, because it's the only way to subscribe.)
>
>>> I am not interested in an avalanche of mails from which I am not
>>> interested in 80 % of them.
>>
>>I agree -- thus [email protected] doesn't seem ideal.  But
>>some other magic e-mail address?  It could even go to /dev/null.
>
> If there's a magic email address that is the maintainer of these
> packages, then well-intentioned contributors will look up that address
> in the Packages file (or equivalent) and then send email to it, and
> then not get any response from the maintainer-of-record, defeating the
> purpose of declaring a maintainer email address.
>
> On one hand, you could argue that those well-intentioned contributors
> are simply wrong and should always have been using [email protected],
> but on the other hand, there's a lot to be said for Rusty Russell's
> "How Do I Make This Hard to Misuse?" (which was about kernel API
> design, but the same principles can apply in many other places). If we
> aim to make the obvious thing correct and/or make the wrong thing
> impossible, then we can eliminate a whole category of mistakes.
>
> We sometimes already see this in teams like GNOME, Python, Games where
> there is basically nobody (perhaps literally nobody) subscribed to the
> avalanche-of-mails mailing list, because instead, all maintainers are
> subscribed to either the few packages that they personally "own" or
> have touched recently (particularly in "loose" teams like Games and
> Python), or the "team" group on the package tracking system if they do
> want the full fire-hose experience.
>
>     smcv
>
>
signature.asc (application/pgp-signature, 1.2 KB)