[aur-general] changing the status of the maintainer field

[Abhishek Dasgupta]

2009/5/22 Gerardo Exequiel Pozzi <vmlinuz386 at yahoo.com.ar>:
> 1) Technical purposes: Having a "# Maintainer" comment line can provide
> a simple way to shell scripts to identify the maintainer, that in many
> cases the maintainer != packager. (pacman -Qi) This help in many cases,
> for example reporting a "mass change/rebuild/bug/feature/etc/random".
>
> 2) Ethical: While many of the PKGBUILD are trivial changes to the
> PKGBUILD.proto, beyond this, which made this PKGBUILD took some
> maintenance time of work, and giving a kind of support for it. So, I
> think it is important that this be retained.
>
>

I started the thread to revive the idea of having a separate maintainer
field for the official repositories which could be parsed by scripts to
update the web interface, instead of using the web interface to change
the maintainer as is done currently. This of course does not apply to
the AUR and the question of Maintainer vs Contributor tag (already discussed
before many times) is irrelevant here.

Currently a dev/TU has to go to the package page and click "Adopt". Also
he/she has to update the Maintainer tag accordingly to match it with the
web interface which is often not done. If the maintainer tag was a proper
field like

maintainer=(username)

then to adopt the package, all one would need to do is change the value
of the maintainer variable and commit to trunk. The web interface would
pick the changes from trunk and update itself. This would make the
maintainer tag more relevant and easier to parse by scripts.

This does not apply to the AUR since everything depends on the web
interface there. IMO, the official repositories should have their metadata
independent of the web interface, in the PKGBUILDs if possible. If this
change is implemented, then one would not need to visit the web interface
for such a common task.

-- 
Abhishek