Re: unmaintained packages hidden by team maintenance (was Re: Bits from the DPL)

Simon Josefsson <[email protected]> Thu, 05 Feb 2026 22:58:22 +0100

Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.project
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

Fabian Grünbichler <[email protected]> writes:

> On Thu, Feb 5, 2026, at 7:21 PM, Colin Watson wrote:
>> On Thu, Feb 05, 2026 at 06:22:13PM +0100, Simon Josefsson wrote:
>>>Do you (or anyone else) update the Uploaders field?  In what way?
>>
>> I feel like I probably should in some way, but at the moment I basically 
>> don't unless I particularly feel inclined to take over primary 
>> maintenance of that particular package.
>
> The effective practice in the Rust team also matches this.
>
> Uploaders usually contains whoever first packaged a particular crate,
> and potentially people who expressed a particular interest in it after,
> if they bothered (enough) to add themselves.
>
> To pick a random example - rust-cargo's last non-team upload by someobdy
> in Uploaders was in 2021, the 27(!) uploads after were "Team uploads"
> (with all but one marked as such). I guess I should add myself to
> Uploaders with the next one ;) for rust-libc it's very similar (26 uploads
> since the last non-team-upload in 2021). Many crate packages might only
> have a single upload by the Uploader (the first one to NEW).

So if this is the de-facto situation for Python, Go and Rust team, I
wonder if we shouldn't make the 'Uploaders:' field optional to allow
team Maintainer: fields without any particular Uploaders: fields.

It seems to me that the Uploaders: fields doesn't really reflect any
relevant information, or at least none that is kept up to date.

Is there any reason we couldn't make this change to policy?

/Simon

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