Beyond QA: Uploaders field hygiene

You all may have seen bugs filed by the MIA team to update the Uploaders
list. These bugs are usually the consequence of an MIA case concluding
that a contributor is no longer active and should no longer be listed as
an uploader.

But this is not just an MIA team task. The Uploaders field is part of
the package's maintenance metadata, and keeping it reasonably accurate
should be part of maintaining the package. If you notice that someone
listed there no longer appears to be actively maintaining the package,
please consider cleaning it up.

Nobody should be expected to investigate the current status of every
person listed there as part of every upload. This is a best-effort
maintenance task, not another bureaucratic requirement.

As the scope of the MIA process is contributor activities in Debian as a
whole, the MIA team cannot provide this information on a per-package
basis. If someone is still active in Debian but has quietly moved away
from a specific package, the maintainer is in the best position to
notice these package-specific changes. This complements the MIA team's
Debian-wide perspective and can also provide useful triggers for MIA
cases.

As a related point, when an ITS process results in a change of package
maintainership, the Uploaders field should be cleaned up, particularly
when Uploaders have not responded in the process.  The ITS procedure
should be updated to make this explicit; this is something that should
be discussed on debian-devel rather than anticipated here.

One final clarification: this mail is not intended to reopen the broader
discussion about the usefulness or future of the Uploaders field. That
is a separate discussion, and this is not the place to have it. For now,
we are simply describing the expectations under the current model. These
recommendations can and should be revisited if there are changes in how
we treat the Uploaders field.

Coming back to where we started: keeping the Uploaders field reasonably
up to date also means fewer "Remove from Uploaders" bugs from the MIA
team. A little best-effort maintenance here may therefore save everyone
some work later.

-- 
For the MIA team, with thanks to my fellow MIA team members Paul Gevers
and Nilesh Patra for their reviews and suggestions,
 
tobi

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