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

[Baho Utot]

On Fri, 2009-05-22 at 19:35 +0530, Abhishek Dasgupta wrote:
> 2009/5/22 Allan McRae <allan at archlinux.org>:
> > I am very much against adding _unnecessary_ fields to PKGBUILDs...   If
> > these are not needed by makepkg or pacman, they should only be comments.  It
> > is going to take a lot of convincing for me to think otherwise.
> >
> 
> As long as the information in # Maintainer tags and the web interface
> is the *same*, there is no problem.
> 
> What is required is an easily accessible database of current maintainers
> for each package. It's always best to have as much information available
> in easily downloadable form. One way (and there can be numerous
> different ways of doing this) is to put this in the PKGBUILD in a parseable
> form -- the reason for a bash array with the username:
> - makes it easily parseable by bash scripts
> - putting only the username and no other extraneous information
>   as email etc can change.
> - ignored by makepkg as it does not recognise it (and doesn't need to)
> - has no effect on the binary
> 
> As an example consider the *files.db.tar.gz stuff. Before that if one wanted
> to check the filelist of a particular package, one would need to download
> that particular package and check out its contents. Now, the files database
> is put in an easily accessible location which enables programs like pkgfile
> to access and make use of that information.
> 
> While this information could have been put as a kind of API (like the AUR
> JSON interface) that would have reduced usability for users who would like
> to view a filelist offline.
> 
> Currently there is no _simple_ way for scripts of finding the maintainer of a
> given package in the official repositories. The only way is to parse the webpage
> which is hackish and certainly not KISS. An abs (or even svn) checkout does not
> help since there is no necessity that the Maintainer tag in the PKGBUILD and the
> maintainer listed in the web interface is the same; which just makes
> the Maintainer
> tag in the PKGBUILD totally irrelevant since one has to check the web interface
> anyway.
> 
> All this was discussed in the arch-dev-public thread I mentioned a few
> posts back.
> At that time, most people seemed to agree that this was a good idea but
> nothing came of it.
> 

If those fields were a bash variable......

A utility could be written to find PKGBUILDs maintained by people no
longer active/verify that all PKGBUILDS in core/extra have a active
maintainer.