Re: [pacman-dev] should we show maintainer info in pacman -Qi / -Si ?

On Sun, Feb 13, 2011 at 11:42:38AM +0100, Pierre Schmitz wrote:

On Sun, 13 Feb 2011 11:22:54 +0100, Dieter Plaetinck wrote:

...

with pacman -Qi or pacman -Si we show the person who packaged it, but not the maintainer. This makes it harder to get in touch with the right person then it should be. Often I will start talking to the packager (or assign a ticket to him), only to have that person to tell me "hey, i'm just the guy who packaged it, you should really talk to $foo"

Shouldn't we put the maintainer also in the pacman output?

Dieter

Would be nice. But the problem is we don't have this information. Afaik we had a discussion about this a long time ago. At first we would need a new variable defined within a PKGBUILD. E.g.: maintainers=('Dieter Plaetinck ' 'Pierre Schmitz ')

makepkg would need to put that into the .PKGINFO file and repo-add needs to put these information into the db files.

I would really like to have this feature, but obviously there were some concerns; otherwise it would have been implemented. ;-) But I don't remember anything. Afaik I brought this up when we regularly lost all maintainer information.

I guess that the main issue with this is the procedure of changing a package's maintainer. In case of the AUR that would mean that you'd have to remove one's name from the "maintainers" array, do a pkgrel bump, rebuild the source package and re-upload it before disowning/orphaning something. Same applies to the adoption of a package and to the official repos, of course. With regard to the binary repos, this is even more of an issue as each adoption and each removal of a maintainer would require a pkgrel bump and a rebuild. Image that in case of one of those insane 500MB packages...