2009/5/22 Gerardo Exequiel Pozzi <vmlinuz386@yahoo.com.ar>:
1) Technical purposes: Having a "# Maintainer" comment line can provide a simple way to shell scripts to identify the maintainer, that in many cases the maintainer != packager. (pacman -Qi) This help in many cases, for example reporting a "mass change/rebuild/bug/feature/etc/random".
2) Ethical: While many of the PKGBUILD are trivial changes to the PKGBUILD.proto, beyond this, which made this PKGBUILD took some maintenance time of work, and giving a kind of support for it. So, I think it is important that this be retained.
I started the thread to revive the idea of having a separate maintainer field for the official repositories which could be parsed by scripts to update the web interface, instead of using the web interface to change the maintainer as is done currently. This of course does not apply to the AUR and the question of Maintainer vs Contributor tag (already discussed before many times) is irrelevant here. Currently a dev/TU has to go to the package page and click "Adopt". Also he/she has to update the Maintainer tag accordingly to match it with the web interface which is often not done. If the maintainer tag was a proper field like maintainer=(username) then to adopt the package, all one would need to do is change the value of the maintainer variable and commit to trunk. The web interface would pick the changes from trunk and update itself. This would make the maintainer tag more relevant and easier to parse by scripts. This does not apply to the AUR since everything depends on the web interface there. IMO, the official repositories should have their metadata independent of the web interface, in the PKGBUILDs if possible. If this change is implemented, then one would not need to visit the web interface for such a common task. -- Abhishek