Hello Ubuntu developers,
a fair while ago, the Debian project collectively decided that Ubuntu
source and binary packages should not carry Debian's maintainers in
their Maintainer: field any more. Instead, we shall preserve them in
the Original-Maintainer: field and put an Ubuntu specific contact into
Maintainer:. Please see the specification [1] for details.
With the recent dpkg upload [2], this now gets enforced. I. e.
dpkg-source (called from dpkg-buildpackage and debuild) refuses to
create a source package if the version number indicates Ubuntu
modifications, but the Maintainer address is not Ubuntuish. The new
default values for these fields are:
Ubuntu Core Developers <ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com>
for packages in main and restricted, and
Ubuntu MOTU Developers <ubuntu-motu@lists.ubuntu.com>
for packages in universe and multiverse.
However, if a particular package deserves a more specific contact,
then it is encouraged to use a personal or team mailing list contact
(however, it must be an @ubuntu.com address).
In source package's debian/control fields, the original maintainer
must be preserved in the field
XSBC-Original-Maintainer:
dpkg will then create an 'Original-Maintainer:' field in the .dsc
(flag 'S'), .deb (flag 'B') and .changes (flag 'C') files. If you are
interested in the details of this XSBC magic, please see [3].
In the next four weeks (until Feisty's beta freeze) I will coordinate
the necessary 129 source package rebuilds which are necessary for
getting all binary packages in Ubuntu main fixed for the new
maintainer fields. If you are maintaining a particular set of packages
that matter size-wise, and you are sure that you want to upload a new
version in the next month, please add them to [4].
Thank you for your attention,
Martin Pitt
on behalf of the Ubuntu distro team
[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebianMaintainerField
[2] http://librarian.launchpad.net/6442300/dpkg_1.13.24ubuntu4_source.changes
[3] http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-controlfields.html#s5.7
[4] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MaintainerFieldRebuilds
-- Martin Pitt http://www.piware.de Ubuntu Developer http://www.ubuntu.com Debian Developer http://www.debian.org
-- ubuntu-devel-announce mailing list ubuntu-devel-announce@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-announce