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

[Heiko Baums]

Am Fri, 22 May 2009 14:55:43 +1000
schrieb Allan McRae <allan at archlinux.org>:

> BAH!  ...and again, BAH!
> 
> It is a comment people...  just a comment.  makepkg and pacman don't 
> care about it and nor should anyone else!

On the one hand I somehow agree with people, who don't care too much
about these tags, on the other hand I agree with people, who think,
they are quite important.

Even if I've somehow mistaken both tags in the past and put me as a
contributor instead of a maintainer in my PKGBUILDs - I will change this
some time -, I agree, that Maintainer should contain the current
maintainer, and that Contributor should contain the previous
Maintainers or people, who sent patches for the PKGBUILD to the
maintainer.

I think these tags - at least the Maintainer tag - are quite important,
because a user should be able to easily find out, who has written the
PKGBUILD and whom to contact, if there's an issue with the PKGBUILD.

I'm not sure, if this should be realised as an obligatory field or a
comment. With a field the maintainer is forced to add his name and
e-mail address to the PKGBUILD, and this is checked by makepkg or
pacman.

Comments are more flexible, so that more maintainers and contributors
can be added to the PKGBUILD. In this case the PKGBUILD can be parsed
by AUR - it's already done anyway - when a package is uploaded to AUR.
If the Maintainer tag is missing the package will be rejected and the
maintainer, who tries to upload it, gets a corresponding message.

Nevertheless I think, there's another point. Aren't the PKGBUILDs
licensed under the GPL?

As far as I know, this would mean, that every current and previous
Maintainer has to be mentioned in the PKGBUILD anyway.

Heiko