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

[Dan McGee]

On Sat, Sep 20, 2008 at 5:24 PM, Dusty Phillips <buchuki at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

I see a few problems/issues here.
1) Maintainer is a shell script comment. This means it is completely
ignored by makepkg, and I will NOT manually parse the file for this
one piece of information, it is just not worth it.
2) Your name will end up in packages you never built. Anyone building
a package from ABS and customizing it doesn't delete the maintainer
tag, and then people will come to you with questions about
pidgin-awesome or something and you will have no idea what they are
talking about.
3) All of this pertains only to organizational issues. Personal users
of makepkg have no real use for this.

>> 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)

I see the problem we are trying to solve, but I'm not convinced this
is the best way to do it. I wish I had an idea to propose though...

-Dan