[arch-dev-public] Let's use the Maintainer tag

[Dusty Phillips]

2008/9/20 Pierre Schmitz <pierre at archlinux.de>:
> Hey devs,
>
> I think our current method of organizing maintainership of packages is not
> optimal. One problem is that we loose those meta information from time to time
> (we have 2667 orphaned packages atm). Also the webinterface for adopting
> packages is not the best solution I could think of. You have to adopt every
> single arch and if you put a package into testing you'll have to adopt it
> again.
>
> On the other side we have the Maintainer tag within our PKGBUILDs since a long
> time, but we don't make use of it. My idea would be parsing those tags
> (multipile maintainers should be possible) with makepkg and put those
> information in every package. In addition to this repo-add should store this
> data in the db-files, too.
>
> That would make things a lot easier, more robust (we have all data stored in
> svn) and consistent. This would also decrease the complexity of the
> webfrontend a lot; it allready reads data from the sync-dbs.
>
> And last but not least support could be added to pacman to display the
> mainter(s). ATM it only shows the packager which confuses some people.

I'm all for it; it would make the web interface more robust. I don't
think the issue with packages being orphaned will come up again, but
having that data accurate in each PKGBUILD and .pkg.tar.gz file would
make the entire world a much better place. (Especially greenland)

Dusty