Excerpts from vlad's message of Sun Jan 17 16:26:33 +0100 2010:
Hello,
On Sat, Jan 16, 2010 at 11:35:59PM -0800, Thayer Williams wrote:
On Sat, Jan 16, 2010 at 6:58 PM, <vla@uni-bonn.de> wrote:
Further when someone disowns a PKGBUILD for some reason, he also drops the responsibility for this package. So what's the reason of adding two or more persons to the PKGBUILD who actually don't have anything more to do with it? However, I think the most easy and clear way is to add a single name with mail address to the PKGBUILD - this means this person is in charge of it.
I don't see this as an issue that's worthy of debate so I won't comment much on the matter myself. Others may disagree... Hehe, me neither.
Personally, I feel it's important to give credit where credit is due. IMO it doesn't matter whether someone orphans a PKGBUILD, they still deserve credit for their initial efforts in creating/maintaining it. I also believe it's valid for non-TUs to be considered "maintainers" within the AUR. They are in effect maintaining the package, even if it's only a build script. Should the package later be adopted by a dev/TU then the initial maintainer should be credited for their contribution. That's just good business in my opinion.
Maintainer == current custodian of the PKGBUILD and/or binaries Contributor == one who has previously contributed to the maintenance of said PKGBUILD and/or binary I find this maintainer/contributor stuff and differentiation redundant and confusing.
For completeness sake, what started this was this package maintained by donvla http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=1137