Re: Q: single-maintainer vs team-maintainance of packages

On Tue, Mar 24, 2026 at 11:07:31PM +0100, Simon Josefsson wrote:
>Marc Haber <[email protected]> writes:
>> Adduser, on the other side, I would love to have team maintained. Are
>> you planning to fine me because I have failed to assemble a team
>> around adduser? Or what do you have in your mind to make people do
>> team work if a team fails to form?
>>
>> Will I get people assigned to help with adduser? Who is going to
>> manage those non-volunteers?
>>
>> Team maintainance is a good thing. But forcing or requiring it is not
>> going to work. Don't assume that there are people queuing up to
>> co-maintain packages.
>
>I share your reaction, but also: please don't assume poeple will NOT
>randomly appear if there is a team around packages.  You don't
>necessarily need to do anything beyond changing the 'Maintainer:' field.

Like this: ?
$ git blame debian/control | grep Maintainer
9efa1964 (Marc Haber          2018-02-02 17:07:49 +0100  4) Maintainer: Debian Adduser Developers <[email protected]>

Note the date. Some people appeared, but also vanished again.

>I believe the lack of contribution to single-maintainer packages can be
>attributed (again: to some extent) to the fact the package is perceived
>to be "owned" by a single individual.

There is nothing a single maintainer can do about that. For most of my 
packages, I have maintainer set to the tracker so that anybody can 
subscribe and directly participate.

>I wish there was a 'Debian Developer Team' where all packages could be
>welcome to.

We already have that in Debian salsa. I still appreciate people 
submitting merge requests instead of directly intefering with 
debian/latest.

Greetings
Marc