3.3. The maintainer of a package

Every package must have a maintainer, except for orphaned packages as described below. The maintainer may be one person or a group of people reachable from a common email address, such as a mailing list. The maintainer is responsible for maintaining the Debian packaging files, evaluating and responding appropriately to reported bugs, uploading new versions of the package (either directly or through a sponsor), ensuring that the package is placed in the appropriate archive area and included in Debian releases as appropriate for the stability and utility of the package, and requesting removal of the package from the Debian distribution if it is no longer useful or maintainable.

The maintainer must be specified in the Maintainer control field with their correct name and a working email address. The email address given in the Maintainer control field must accept mail from those role accounts in Debian used to send automated mails regarding the package. This includes non-spam mail from the bug-tracking system, all mail from the Debian archive maintenance software, and other role accounts or automated processes that are commonly agreed on by the project. 1 If one person or team maintains several packages, they should use the same form of their name and email address in the Maintainer fields of those packages.

The format of the Maintainer control field is described in Maintainer.

If the maintainer of the package is a team of people with a shared email address, the Uploaders control field must be present and must contain at least one human with their personal email address. See Uploaders for the syntax of that field.

An orphaned package is one with no current maintainer. Orphaned packages should have their Maintainer control field set to Debian QA Group <packages@qa.debian.org>. These packages are considered maintained by the Debian project as a whole until someone else volunteers to take over maintenance. 2