On Fri, 2009-05-22 at 19:35 +0530, Abhishek Dasgupta wrote: > 2009/5/22 Allan McRae <[email protected]>: > > I am very much against adding _unnecessary_ fields to PKGBUILDs... If > > these are not needed by makepkg or pacman, they should only be comments. It > > is going to take a lot of convincing for me to think otherwise. > > > > As long as the information in # Maintainer tags and the web interface > is the *same*, there is no problem. > > What is required is an easily accessible database of current maintainers > for each package. It's always best to have as much information available > in easily downloadable form. One way (and there can be numerous > different ways of doing this) is to put this in the PKGBUILD in a parseable > form -- the reason for a bash array with the username: > - makes it easily parseable by bash scripts > - putting only the username and no other extraneous information > as email etc can change. > - ignored by makepkg as it does not recognise it (and doesn't need to) > - has no effect on the binary > > As an example consider the *files.db.tar.gz stuff. Before that if one wanted > to check the filelist of a particular package, one would need to download > that particular package and check out its contents. Now, the files database > is put in an easily accessible location which enables programs like pkgfile > to access and make use of that information. > > While this information could have been put as a kind of API (like the AUR > JSON interface) that would have reduced usability for users who would like > to view a filelist offline. > > Currently there is no _simple_ way for scripts of finding the maintainer of a > given package in the official repositories. The only way is to parse the > webpage > which is hackish and certainly not KISS. An abs (or even svn) checkout does > not > help since there is no necessity that the Maintainer tag in the PKGBUILD and > the > maintainer listed in the web interface is the same; which just makes > the Maintainer > tag in the PKGBUILD totally irrelevant since one has to check the web > interface > anyway. > > All this was discussed in the arch-dev-public thread I mentioned a few > posts back. > At that time, most people seemed to agree that this was a good idea but > nothing came of it. >
If those fields were a bash variable...... A utility could be written to find PKGBUILDs maintained by people no longer active/verify that all PKGBUILDS in core/extra have a active maintainer.
