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

[Aaron Griffin]

On Sat, Sep 20, 2008 at 6:23 PM, Dan McGee <dpmcgee at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

As Eric pointed out, Pierre is talking about the maintainer of the
PKGBUILD, not the builder of the package.

Additionally, if parsing shell scripts is the issue here, why not add
some new metainfo:
maintainer="Aaron Griffin <aaronmgriffin at gmail.com>"

Seems ok to me. We could even start doing it right now, as makepkg
will just ignore it for now