Mark Rosenstand wrote:
Hi,
Hey,
I've noticed that many of the recent port adoptions in opt and core have only changed the Maintainer: field and not added a Packager: field for the previous maintainer. In the past I've also noticed a bunch of commits pretty much randomly changing those fields, in particular some of sten's (danm's previous) ports.
A clarification on core/opt ports previously owned by Per: We will normalize maintainer / packager information with the next release. The current headers are a direct consequence of adopting some port as individual developer and some other as a more general 'core-ports'.
Personally I've always wondered what that sort of useless information is doing in an otherwise sparse system like CRUX ports. Sure, the creator of the port could get some credit, but really, creating a port is usually a matter of seconds for the autotools-based ones, minutes for others (in general) and a couple of hours for the really tricky/polished ones.
Well' I won't call it totally useless, and giving some credit is fine.
I also tend to think that the Maintainer: field could be left out and a repo-wide contact address be used instead (being a virtual one for repos with multiple maintainers) - but it does make sense for 'contrib' in its current form, at least, so lets leave that out for today.
The Maintainer field is the only information we have inside opt to see who's owning a port so I think it won't change. Not sure about the core ports: the core team could decide to use a virtual user as you suggest, in any case since the field is needed for opt and contrib I guess keeping it is a sane decision.
Anyway, it'd be nice to reach some consensus and see some consistency with the use of that field. Is the info useful? Could it be located elsewhere, e.g. commit messages? If not, wouldn't (multiple) Contributor: fields make more sense, or will there always be at most 2 people contributing to a port?
I agree some standardization is needed; I think Maintainer/Packager served us quite well so far and I see few reasons to change them; one of them is listing multiple contributors as you pont out: maybe simply using multiple Maintainers line can allow us to add the info without having to rewrite some hundred scripts/tools :) Regards, Simone