Who maintains dpkg?

1. The "original" original author of dpkg  was Ian Murdock. Ian Jackson implemented dpkg in
the way it was first released in Debian 1.1.

2. The end of Jackson's active role as maintainer and developer of dpkg ended with the upload
of version 1.4.0 on 12 Sep 1996. This was followed by two years of "non maintainer uploads".
Then Jackson did a "maintainer upload" of version 1.4.1 on 1 Nov 1998. This one included
fairly minor changes.

3. After that the principal developers and maintainers were mainly Wichert Akkerman, Adam
Heath, Scott James Remnant, Frank Lichtenheld, Guillem Jover, Raphael Hertzog, and many
others.

4. There are patches here and there from Ian Jackson since he gave up dpkg development in
1998. The oldest of these is from 2006.

5. So, there where about eight years silence from Ian Jackson regarding dpkg. The program
developed in many ways in this time.

I don't think Ian Jackson can claim dpkg leadership based on this analysis. This would be
similar to the original NCSA HTTPd authors claiming leadership over Apache.

This doesn't mean that the current dpkg maintainers have done everything right.