Contacting package maintainer
Hi! I recently fixed a bug in icu73-bin AUR package and started to investigate how to push this properly to the maintainer. Wiki clearly says that one should avoid pasting patches into the comments section and rather email the patch to the maintainer. However, the profile detail of the maintainer with this package shows his e-mail address as "hidden". The PKGBUILD itself also does not have any maintainer entry that could be used to identify contact details of the maintainer so I broke the wiki rule and pasted the patch into the comments section. As the maintainer did not responded yet, my question in the meantime is - how is one supposed to discover maintainer's contact email in such case? Thanks, -- Michal
They put their e-mail in a PKGBUILD file for another of their AUR PKGBUILD files. https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/PKGBUILD?h=libzim8 If the maintainer is not active and does not respond within a week or two then you could mark the package as out of date and then do an orphan request to take over the package. I did that for the "blabel" package a few years ago since the previous maintainer didn't update it. https://lists.archlinux.org/archives/list/aur-requests@lists.archlinux.org/m... https://lists.archlinux.org/archives/list/aur-requests@lists.archlinux.org/m... Venlig hilsen / Best regards Morten Jakobsen On Tuesday, February 11th, 2025 at 20:03, Michal Feix <michal@feix.family> wrote:
Hi!
I recently fixed a bug in icu73-bin AUR package and started to investigate how to push this properly to the maintainer. Wiki clearly says that one should avoid pasting patches into the comments section and rather email the patch to the maintainer. However, the profile detail of the maintainer with this package shows his e-mail address as "hidden". The PKGBUILD itself also does not have any maintainer entry that could be used to identify contact details of the maintainer so I broke the wiki rule and pasted the patch into the comments section. As the maintainer did not responded yet, my question in the meantime is - how is one supposed to discover maintainer's contact email in such case?
Thanks,
-- Michal
Hello,
They put their e-mail in a PKGBUILD file for another of their AUR PKGBUILD files.
https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/PKGBUILD?h=libzim8
Michal has already said that the PKGBUILD does not have a email provided, please see [1] there is no email only a username/name? I can also confirm that the email is hidden from their profile [2].
If the maintainer is not active and does not respond within a week or two then you could mark the package as out of date and then do an orphan request to take over the package.
Before doing this, I would send the patch to the comment section, if then the maintainer does not respond then you should flag for orphan explaining you have tried everything in your ability to contact the author, and reference the comment you sent. I can see you have commented [3] the patch. I have also flagged the package out of date as there is a newer version [4], the last update was at the end of 2023, it is safe to say this package is abandoned, just give the maintainer a few weeks to a month just in case. I would say wait until 2025-03-05 (one month from your comment) and if there is still no response, then go for the orphan and adopt the package for yourself. This is more than enough time for the maintainer to respond. Take care, -- Polarian GPG signature: 0770E5312238C760 Jabber/XMPP: polarian@icebound.dev [1] https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/PKGBUILD?h=icu73-bin [2] https://aur.archlinux.org/account/doclai [3] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/icu73-bin#comment-1010042 [4] https://github.com/unicode-org/icu/releases/tag/release-76-1
Am 12. Februar 2025 14:08:34 MEZ schrieb Polarian <polarian@polarian.dev>:
Hello,
They put their e-mail in a PKGBUILD file for another of their AUR PKGBUILD files.
https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/PKGBUILD?h=libzim8
Michal has already said that the PKGBUILD does not have a email provided, please see [1] there is no email only a username/name?
I can also confirm that the email is hidden from their profile [2].
Yes, that is correct, but Morten linked a different package which got uploaded by the user in question and contains an email address in the PKGBUILD. And this could be tried. He was not talking about the package which needs the fix. Best regards
[...] a different package which got uploaded by the user
Not too much to contribute to the existing conversation. But if a maintainer didn't put their name/email at the top of a PKGBUILD, one can always have a look at the git history instead: $ git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/icu73-bin.git $ git -C icu73-bin show --format=fuller --no-patch commit 7c67d59b772993e02eea931dff85a5604a83e07a (HEAD -> master, origin/master, origin/HEAD) Author: doclai <redacted> AuthorDate: Tue Dec 19 11:38:14 2023 +0700 Commit: doclai <redacted> CommitDate: Tue Dec 19 11:38:14 2023 +0700 icu 73.2 with new b2sum (Redacted since it seems the maintainer would like to keep their email address as private as possible. It's the same email as that at the top of libzim8's PKGBUILD.) I'm not sure whether this is more or less accurate in general. On 13/2/25 20:24, Lex Black wrote:
Am 12. Februar 2025 14:08:34 MEZ schrieb Polarian <polarian@polarian.dev>:
Hello,
They put their e-mail in a PKGBUILD file for another of their AUR PKGBUILD files.
https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/PKGBUILD?h=libzim8
Michal has already said that the PKGBUILD does not have a email provided, please see [1] there is no email only a username/name?
I can also confirm that the email is hidden from their profile [2].
Yes, that is correct, but Morten linked a different package which got uploaded by the user in question and contains an email address in the PKGBUILD. And this could be tried. He was not talking about the package which needs the fix.
Best regards
-- Frederick Zhang PGP: 8BFB EA5B 4C44 BFAC C8EC 5F93 1F92 8BE6 0D8B C11D
participants (5)
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Frederick Zhang
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Lex Black
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Michal Feix
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Morten Jakobsen
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Polarian