On Tue, Aug 25, 2020 at 04:46:36PM -0400, Public mailing list for Arch Linux development wrote:
On Tue, 25 Aug 2020 at 15:58:40, Evangelos Foutras via arch-dev-public wrote:
I am not sure these serve any purpose. The maintainer line duplicates information available from the archweb or aur interfaces and could also be outdated. The contributor lines are mostly redundant with svn or git history, can take up several lines in the PKGBUILD and can become irrelevant after significant refactoring.
What are your thoughts on dropping all these seemingly unnecessary lines from our official PKGBUILDs? Anyone feel strongly about keeping them (and why)?
I don't feel strongly and would welcome a better system.
One of the reasons against such a change that was brought in earlier conversations around this topic is that original contributors are hard to reconstruct after a package has been moved from the AUR to the official repositories or vice versa.
Lukas' opinion pretty much reflects my opinion. I just want to add, that other distributions use our PKGBUILDs (Manjaro, ALARM, etc). Having a contributor/maintainer history is the least thing, people can do to 'honor' work related to PKGBUILDs. Maintainer/Contributor lines are also interesting with respect to licensing. This is a difficult topic with no clear answer. Smaller PKGBUILDs are somewhat trivial, but what about bigger ones? I would really like to further read my name in a PKGBUILD in foreign repos like Manjaro, If I have invested hours of work into it (the vault PKGBUILD is one of these examples). Chris