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

[Allan McRae]

Pierre Schmitz wrote:
> 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 like the idea but I think it would be better to just have something 
parse the SVN repo.  Currently makepkg does not see the Maintainer entry 
as it is a comment.  So to have this information get into packages, we 
would need to either change how we set the maintainer field in PKGBUILDs 
or some other hack.  Having the maintainer based on the current field in 
SVN trunk would also allow for orphaning (just remove field) and 
adoption without having to rebuild the package.

Allan