Hello,

Right now we're keeping both email addresses (obligatory) and names
(optional) for downstream maintainers in metadata.xml. The way I see
it, there are three problems with that:

1. As noticed on IRC lately, a few devs haven't been listing their names
at all, resulting in these names being missing from packages.g.o.

2. Not all names are listed consistently. This is especially the case
for projects. When you want to group everything by maintainer, which
name should be used?

3. In the end, listing the same names all over the place is a lot of redundancy.


I'd like to propose that we deprecate <name/> for downstream
maintainers, and instead work towards using an additional mapping from maintainer email addresses to their names.

a. For projects, we can simply use projects.xml. We already require
that all type="project" maintainers correspond to entries
in projects.xml, so we should be good here.

b. For human maintainers, I think we can use metadata/AUTHORS. This is
pretty much killing two birds with one stone -- we could finally getting
the file more complete, and at the same time use it to provide names for maintainers.

While keeping names in metadata.xml has the advantage that they are
immediately available (provided that they are actually listed there),
I don't think this is really a show-stopper.


WDYT?

--
Best regards,
Michał Górny

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On Thu, Apr 7, 2022 at 11:42 AM Michał Górny <[email protected]> wrote:

Hello,

Right now we're keeping both email addresses (obligatory) and names (optional) for downstream maintainers in metadata.xml. The way I see
it, there are three problems with that:

1. As noticed on IRC lately, a few devs haven't been listing their names
at all, resulting in these names being missing from packages.g.o.

2. Not all names are listed consistently. This is especially the case
for projects. When you want to group everything by maintainer, which
name should be used?

3. In the end, listing the same names all over the place is a lot of redundancy.

I'd like to propose that we deprecate <name/> for downstream
maintainers, and instead work towards using an additional mapping from maintainer email addresses to their names.

a. For projects, we can simply use projects.xml. We already require
that all type="project" maintainers correspond to entries
in projects.xml, so we should be good here.

b. For human maintainers, I think we can use metadata/AUTHORS. This is pretty much killing two birds with one stone -- we could finally getting
the file more complete, and at the same time use it to provide names for maintainers.

While keeping names in metadata.xml has the advantage that they are immediately available (provided that they are actually listed there),
I don't think this is really a show-stopper.

Sounds like a good plan to me.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On 8 Apr 2022, at 00:07, Matt Turner <[email protected]> wrote:

On Thu, Apr 7, 2022 at 11:42 AM Michał Górny <[email protected]> wrote:

Hello,

Right now we're keeping both email addresses (obligatory) and names
(optional) for downstream maintainers in metadata.xml. The way I see
it, there are three problems with that:

1. As noticed on IRC lately, a few devs haven't been listing their names
at all, resulting in these names being missing from packages.g.o.

2. Not all names are listed consistently. This is especially the case
for projects. When you want to group everything by maintainer, which
name should be used?

3. In the end, listing the same names all over the place is a lot of
redundancy.


I'd like to propose that we deprecate <name/> for downstream
maintainers, and instead work towards using an additional mapping from
maintainer email addresses to their names.

a. For projects, we can simply use projects.xml. We already require
that all type="project" maintainers correspond to entries
in projects.xml, so we should be good here.

b. For human maintainers, I think we can use metadata/AUTHORS. This is
pretty much killing two birds with one stone -- we could finally getting
the file more complete, and at the same time use it to provide names for
maintainers.

While keeping names in metadata.xml has the advantage that they are
immediately available (provided that they are actually listed there),
I don't think this is really a show-stopper.

Sounds like a good plan to me.

Yep. It also has a nice consequence of allowing AUTHORS to be used as a mailmap for git (although git doesn't respect symlinks for mailmap, so we'd need to tell
people to set it with the config option, but still.)

The main value for me is in making AUTHORS more useful. If it has to exist,
we should use it properly.

But I love a bit of deduplication too.

Best,
sam

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----

iQGTBAEBCgB9FiEEYOpPv/uDUzOcqtTy9JIoEO6gSDsFAmJPcrNfFIAAAAAALgAo aXNzdWVyLWZwckBub3RhdGlvbnMub3BlbnBncC5maWZ0aGhvcnNlbWFuLm5ldDYw RUE0RkJGRkI4MzUzMzM5Q0FBRDRGMkY0OTIyODEwRUVBMDQ4M0IACgkQ9JIoEO6g SDubVQgAghQ2Ob9prWOHi6fmOkyU91kTojZNbBsjxlUHD2zTJfMbQcJmM7uy4Iif 8nSv3JH4Wb5v97JErO+g6CHTEcVHvo6Sz0D/cMLPOCit6WJRxEmaxJYsgnl67dBN vnliQzVqu+epfQmiEoxUNqlYDAI/skAobGwCKUUaPIFkj/0zm95Tmf/t1N1IbUkP 8U1pSf564JTa23yfoa4rDzIjEFjH7XQqBG8kn/7VZ2FYjQa1Ofkgcxd/zsimsLjD VEciw92mULJmpeaD2jKLnRW0zsf5it++mxb9jXLrR8YWW8MskWePUCCSA2/wbIqC KuUwxuMfFePBFy5GP8a+gFMdJeyJ6w==
=aWWU
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)