Why I love collaborative maintenance

zack@aquarium:~/pkg-ocaml-maint/trunk/packages$ find . -name control -exec sed -i s/XS-X-Vcs-Svn/XS-Vcs-Svn/ {} \;
zack@aquarium:~/pkg-ocaml-maint/trunk/packages$ svn commit -m 'renamed Vcs-Svn to match the final name'
Sending        packages/advi/trunk/debian/control
<snip>
Transmitting file data ..........................................................................................
Committed revision 3216.

Wouldn't it be super cool to be able to do the same on all packages of the Debian archive?

And no, I'm not speaking about the damned XS-Vcs-* field with which I've already bothered you a lot. I'm talking about the ability of perform massive changes on the whole bunch of Debian packages in a batch fashion.

Of course permissions should be accounted for, but it can be reduced to not being a big deal. Just map the current idea of maintenance group to regular Unix groups used to govern who-can-commit-where in the repository, perhaps with some super-group like "release managers" or "qa" who can commit everywhere.

Finally, add the topping of a couple of scripts to automatically rebuild and/or upload packages from the repository.

Wouldn't that have a great potential of improving the boring procedure of NMU, never too quick and easy to not hinder its diffusion?