[aur-general] Maintainer vs Contributor tag let's find a solution ; )
Hi, this thread were discussed in the history, so I think is time to clarify and put the correct information to the wiki. (Actually on the recent TU application and sunjdk package). IIRC: a) Maintainer tag in PKGBUILD is just use for people who maintain the binary package generated by this PKGBUILD on official repositories (core, extra, community*), and the people with abilities to do this are TU and Devs. b) Contributor tag is for people who upload the PKGBUILD for first time or is maintaining it at this time. But sometimes this is hard to apply, for example I adopted an orphan PKGBUILD on AUR and I decided to update it and maintain it, what I should have to do: 1.- Should I remove the past contributor and add myself as a Contributor? 2.- Should I keep all the contributor list even if they are more than 4 different people (4 lines more to the PKGBUILD) 3.- Add myself to the maintainer tag? IMO I will use the second option, to keep all the contributor list, maybe tomorrow I won't be able to contribute with this PKGBUILD but it will be nice, to the future owners of these PKGBUILD to know who maintained before them. But maybe we will have a long list of contributors, so, it would be nice to discuss an idea to have tags for maintainers of PKGBUILD with have a binary and contributors of PKGBUILDs, as I said, i would like to improve a method to apply the second idea. Please try to don't flame the ideas, try to propose new ones, or improve the exposed by me. Regards Note: * Many people should disagree with the idea about "community" and "official repo", IMO if community it's enabled by default on pacman, community became official, no matter what the history was... -- Angel Velásquez angvp @ irc.freenode.net Linux Counter: #359909
On Mon, Apr 06, 2009 at 08:20:41PM +1930, Angel Velásquez wrote:
Hi, this thread were discussed in the history, so I think is time to clarify and put the correct information to the wiki. (Actually on the recent TU application and sunjdk package).
IIRC:
a) Maintainer tag in PKGBUILD is just use for people who maintain the binary package generated by this PKGBUILD on official repositories (core, extra, community*), and the people with abilities to do this are TU and Devs.
b) Contributor tag is for people who upload the PKGBUILD for first time or is maintaining it at this time.
But sometimes this is hard to apply, for example I adopted an orphan PKGBUILD on AUR and I decided to update it and maintain it, what I should have to do:
1.- Should I remove the past contributor and add myself as a Contributor? 2.- Should I keep all the contributor list even if they are more than 4 different people (4 lines more to the PKGBUILD) 3.- Add myself to the maintainer tag?
The accepted practice is to keep a contributor comment for all significant contributors of a PKGBUILD. I don't think it really matters if there's a maintainer comment or not. Maintainers for all packages are tracked by other means. That comment doesn't carry much weight. There's really no reason why maintainers of unsupported packages couldn't use it if they really wanted to.
On Sun, Apr 5, 2009 at 21:06, Loui Chang
The accepted practice is to keep a contributor comment for all significant contributors of a PKGBUILD.
I don't think it really matters if there's a maintainer comment or not. Maintainers for all packages are tracked by other means. That comment doesn't carry much weight. There's really no reason why maintainers of unsupported packages couldn't use it if they really wanted to.
I agree with this to a degree, but it is somewhat useful to have that information stored in the PKGBUILD, so that you don't have to go through the AUR interface, IMO
Hi, this thread were discussed in the history, so I think is time to clarify and put the correct information to the wiki. (Actually on the recent TU application and sunjdk package).
IIRC:
a) Maintainer tag in PKGBUILD is just use for people who maintain the binary package generated by this PKGBUILD on official repositories (core, extra, community*), and the people with abilities to do this are TU and Devs.
b) Contributor tag is for people who upload the PKGBUILD for first time or is maintaining it at this time. This was the previous method, but the general consensus in the
But sometimes this is hard to apply, for example I adopted an orphan PKGBUILD on AUR and I decided to update it and maintain it, what I should have to do:
1.- Should I remove the past contributor and add myself as a Contributor? 2.- Should I keep all the contributor list even if they are more than 4 different people (4 lines more to the PKGBUILD) 3.- Add myself to the maintainer tag?
2009/4/5 Angel Velásquez
IMO I will use the second option, to keep all the contributor list, maybe tomorrow I won't be able to contribute with this PKGBUILD but it will be nice, to the future owners of these PKGBUILD to know who maintained before them. But maybe we will have a long list of contributors, so, it would be nice to discuss an idea to have tags for maintainers of PKGBUILD with have a binary and contributors of PKGBUILDs, as I said, i would like to improve a method to apply the second idea. I don't quite follow... you say that you want to improve the method, but you insist that we don't change it and use the old one? Please correct me if I'm wrong
Please try to don't flame the ideas, try to propose new ones, or improve the exposed by me. Uh.. what? Disregarding this...
Regards
Note:
* Many people should disagree with the idea about "community" and "official repo", IMO if community it's enabled by default on pacman, community became official, no matter what the history was... With this I agree to an extent.
-- Angel Velásquez angvp @ irc.freenode.net Linux Counter: #359909
5. Change the previous maintainer tag to a contributor tag and add yourself as maintainer
I don't quite follow... you say that you want to improve the method, but you insist that we don't change it and use the old one? Please correct me if I'm wrong
This should be 4.- and it's more like than my 2nd point .. then that point about Maintainer is just because exist a binary package in official repos and it's maintained by will be lost, so the concept will change to Maintainer is the people who actually owns the PKGBUILD in any repo or AUR.. (just to clarify how to use the tags).
Please try to don't flame the ideas, try to propose new ones, or improve the exposed by me. Uh.. what? Disregarding this...
Don't know, sometimes I just generate flames, maybe is my bad english :D. So resuming: there is a new point on the list! by Daenyth, who will decide will be the valid point is the question that I have right now. Cheers! -- Angel Velásquez angvp @ irc.freenode.net Linux Counter: #359909
2009/4/5 Angel Velásquez
This should be 4.- and it's more like than my 2nd point .. then that point about Maintainer is just because exist a binary package in official repos and it's maintained by will be lost, so the concept will change to Maintainer is the people who actually owns the PKGBUILD in any repo or AUR.. (just to clarify how to use the tags). I don't really have any comment to add here, but I'm not quite sure if I understand... you're saying that the intention of the maintainer tag is to store the data because the binary repos don't?
Don't know, sometimes I just generate flames, maybe is my bad english :D. Ah, ok. I was confused :P
So resuming: there is a new point on the list! by Daenyth, who will decide will be the valid point is the question that I have right now. As I said before, it seems like the general consensus was in favor of changing it. http://www.archlinux.org/pipermail/aur-general/2008-October/002502.html
As I said before, it seems like the general consensus was in favor of changing it. http://www.archlinux.org/pipermail/aur-general/2008-October/002502.html
But this was the last reply [1] by foutrelis, and confused me.. seems that even Aaron Griffin agree with having the maintainer tag for the actual maintainer and the past maintainers became contributors. P.S: I knew that this wasn't a Deja-vu and we discussed this before (for the record I didn't participated in the last discussion) [1] http://www.archlinux.org/pipermail/aur-general/2008-October/002514.html -- Angel Velásquez angvp @ irc.freenode.net Linux Counter: #359909
I think it makes the most sense to designate the person currently maintaining the package/PKGBUILD as the maintainer irrespective of that person's status in the community or the destination of the package/PKGBUILD. It immediately indicates to anyone looking at the PKGBUILD whom they should contact about updating it. I think previous maintainers should be listed as contributors along with anyone who's contributed signficant changes to the package. Telling people that they can't claim to be a "maintainer" of a package because they're not a dev or TU comes across the wrong way too. Just because the binary isn't hosted in the AUR doesn't mean that the work of maintaining a package (updating, responding to comments, etc) is any different than if the binary were uploaded. Just my 2¢.
On Sun, Apr 5, 2009 at 21:39, Xyne
I think it makes the most sense to designate the person currently maintaining the package/PKGBUILD as the maintainer irrespective of that person's status in the community or the destination of the package/PKGBUILD. It immediately indicates to anyone looking at the PKGBUILD whom they should contact about updating it.
I think previous maintainers should be listed as contributors along with anyone who's contributed signficant changes to the package.
Telling people that they can't claim to be a "maintainer" of a package because they're not a dev or TU comes across the wrong way too. Just because the binary isn't hosted in the AUR doesn't mean that the work of maintaining a package (updating, responding to comments, etc) is any different than if the binary were uploaded.
Just my 2¢.
+1 on all counts
Here goes an section from the the PKGBUILD man page:
EXAMPLE
The following is an example PKGBUILD for the patch package. For more
examples, look through the build files of your distribution’s packages.
For those using Arch Linux, consult the ABS tree.
# Maintainer: Joe User
participants (5)
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Allan McRae
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Angel Velásquez
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Daenyth Blank
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Loui Chang
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Xyne