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

[Loui Chang]

On Sun 13 Feb 2011 17:05 +0100, Lukas Fleischer wrote:
> 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?
> > 
> > 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...

What if the maintainer database is separate of the packages, kind of
like the filelist databases that are available? We can see the file list
of that 500MB package without actually downloading that package.

You could just do a 'maintainer update' and skip the pkgrel bump. In
that case full package rebuilds would not be critical to discover the
current maintainer.