[pacman-dev] should we show maintainer info in pacman -Qi / -Si ?

[Lukas Fleischer]

On Sun, Feb 13, 2011 at 11:42:38AM +0100, Pierre Schmitz wrote:
> On Sun, 13 Feb 2011 11:22:54 +0100, Dieter Plaetinck wrote:
> > with pacman -Qi or pacman -Si we show the person who packaged it, but
> > not the maintainer.
> > This makes it harder to get in touch with the right person then it should be.
> > Often I will start talking to the packager (or assign a ticket to
> > him), only to have that person to tell me "hey, i'm just the guy who
> > packaged it, you should really talk to $foo"
> > 
> > Shouldn't we put the maintainer also in the pacman output?
> > 
> > Dieter
> 
> Would be nice. But the problem is we don't have this information. Afaik
> we had a discussion about this a long time ago. At first we would need a
> new variable defined within a PKGBUILD. E.g.:
> maintainers=('Dieter Plaetinck <dieter at archlinux.org>' 'Pierre Schmitz
> <pierre at archlinux.org>')
> 
> makepkg would need to put that into the .PKGINFO file and repo-add
> needs to put these information into the db files.
> 
> I would really like to have this feature, but obviously there were some
> concerns; otherwise it would have been implemented. ;-) But I don't
> remember anything. Afaik I brought this up when we regularly lost all
> maintainer information.

I guess that the main issue with this is the procedure of changing a
package's maintainer. In case of the AUR that would mean that you'd have
to remove one's name from the "maintainers" array, do a pkgrel bump,
rebuild the source package and re-upload it before disowning/orphaning
something. Same applies to the adoption of a package and to the official
repos, of course. With regard to the binary repos, this is even more of
an issue as each adoption and each removal of a maintainer would require
a pkgrel bump and a rebuild. Image that in case of one of those insane
500MB packages...