[gentoo-dev] [RFC] Moving <maintainer/> <name/>s outta metadata.xml, into a consistent mapping

[Michał Górny]

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