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

[Allan McRae]

On 14/02/11 02:56, Loui Chang wrote:
> 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.

Well that requires no changes to pacman/makepkg...  just export it from 
the Arch the web interface.

> 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.


Allan