[arch-dev-public] [RFC] Removing maintainer/contributor lines from PKGBUILDs

[Christian Rebischke]

On Tue, Aug 25, 2020 at 04:46:36PM -0400, Public mailing list for Arch Linux development wrote:
> On Tue, 25 Aug 2020 at 15:58:40, Evangelos Foutras via arch-dev-public wrote:
> > I am not sure these serve any purpose. The maintainer line duplicates
> > information available from the archweb or aur interfaces and could
> > also be outdated. The contributor lines are mostly redundant with svn
> > or git history, can take up several lines in the PKGBUILD and can
> > become irrelevant after significant refactoring.
> > 
> > What are your thoughts on dropping all these seemingly unnecessary
> > lines from our official PKGBUILDs? Anyone feel strongly about keeping
> > them (and why)?
> 
> I don't feel strongly and would welcome a better system.
> 
> One of the reasons against such a change that was brought in earlier
> conversations around this topic is that original contributors are hard
> to reconstruct after a package has been moved from the AUR to the
> official repositories or vice versa.

Lukas' opinion pretty much reflects my opinion. I just want to add,
that other distributions use our PKGBUILDs (Manjaro, ALARM, etc).
Having a contributor/maintainer history is the least thing, people can
do to 'honor' work related to PKGBUILDs. Maintainer/Contributor lines
are also interesting with respect to licensing. This is a difficult
topic with no clear answer. Smaller PKGBUILDs are somewhat trivial,
but what about bigger ones? I would really like to further read my name
in a PKGBUILD in foreign repos like Manjaro, If I have invested hours
of work into it (the vault PKGBUILD is one of these examples).

Chris
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 833 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-dev-public/attachments/20200826/fa79a083/attachment.sig>