Re: Maintainer: Debian Commons

On Tue, 12 May 2026 at 10:50:31 +0200, Timo Röhling wrote:
>So I took the liberty and created a Debian Commons team on tracker.d.o 
>[1]. You can now use "Debian Commons <[email protected]>" 
>as Maintainer, which will auto-add them to this team.

Thanks for doing this, but ...

>Incidentally, I also muted the group for myself so I don't get all 
>emails for all Debian Commons packages

... this nicely illustrates the problem that I mentioned elsewhere in 
the thread (already present in several larger teams), where a 
well-intentioned contributor who looks up the Maintainer address of a 
package and sends email to it will not get any response from that 
package's maintainer, in the case where the Maintainer address is the 
one you've just created.

This pattern seems like it rather defeats the original purpose of having 
maintainers with email addresses listed in source packages at all: if 
you see an email address, it's natural to assume that sending emails to 
it is a sensible thing to do, but in this case it isn't.

Instead, our contributors have to "just know" that actually the 
Maintainer address is often a trap for the unwary, and instead they 
should be using one of the addresses described in 
https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/developers-reference/beyond-pkging.en.html#contacting-other-maintainers 
(or a bug report) if they want the maintainer of the package to receive 
their messages.

Paul's suggestion of using the @packages.debian.org address avoids that 
problem, by having the Maintainer address be an alias that already gets 
forwarded to subscribers to an individual package, and is already used 
to deliver potentially important information (so it would be reasonable 
to say that co-maintainers should already be subscribed).

     smcv