Developer Responsibilities

General advice

For those new to Ubuntu development, it can be difficult to find out who is responsible for particular components. Often, it is sufficient to just file a bug and trust Launchpad to deliver the information to the right people for you. However, it can be useful to talk to people informally first.

Many Ubuntu packages do not have maintainers in Ubuntu as such. Since we inherit many packages from Debian unchanged, the responsible person is often the corresponding Debian maintainer. When there is a responsible person in Ubuntu, sometimes the Maintainer field will tell you. For example:

$ apt-cache show upstart | grep ^Maintainer:
Maintainer: Scott James Remnant <scott@ubuntu.com>

However, sometimes this will just be a generic mailing list. For example:

$ apt-cache show hal | grep ^Maintainer:
Maintainer: Ubuntu Core Developers <ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com>

You can look for consistent contributors in the changelog (/usr/share/doc/PACKAGE/changelog.Debian.gz, or /usr/share/doc/PACKAGE/changelog.gz for native packages). Remember that the last uploader may just have been making a "drive-by" fix and not have a significant ongoing interest in or knowledge of the package.

The list of Launchpad bug contacts for the package (which can be found at https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/PACKAGE) may be helpful. However, it may also contain non-developers who registered an interest in bugs filed on the package but do not contribute to it.

Specific responsibilities

Where general techniques do not help, the following list may do. This is not a canonical list of maintainers by any stretch of the imagination, but it may be a useful guideline. Please help to keep this list up to date! Please do not be offended if your name has been omitted, but instead add it where appropriate.

CategoryProcess