Re: Maintainer overview

[Jambunathan K <kjambunathan@gmail.com>]

Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

> Emacs has more than a few bits and pieces that some specific people feel
> ownership to.  However, we don't really seem to have a mechanism for
> notifying these people when bugs that affect their packages show up in
> the Emacs bug tracker.
>
> I think it would be very nice if we had such a list of
> packages/maintainers -- that was up-to-date.
>
> Now, some of the .el files themselves do have Maintainer: lines, but you
> really have to root around, and know that you're supposed to root
> around, to find them.
>
> What I'd ideally like to see is to be able to say `C package TAB' (in
> debbugs-gnu mode, of course) and see what packages a bug report can be
> assigned to, and have the maintainer(s) Cc'd on the existence of the bug
> report.
>
> I think the most pleasant way to do this would be to add a slightly more
> formal Maintainer: syntax.  Grepping though the sources, we find stuff
> like:
>
> vt-control.el:6:;; Maintainer: Rob Riepel <riepel@networking.stanford.edu>
> whitespace.el:6:;; Maintainer: Vinicius Jose Latorre <viniciusjl@ig.com.br>
> wid-edit.el:6:;; Maintainer: FSF
> window.el:6:;; Maintainer: FSF
> woman.el:6:;; Maintainer: FSF
> x-dnd.el:6:;; Maintainer: FSF
> xml.el:6:;; Maintainer: Mark A. Hershberger <mah@everybody.org>
> calc/calc-aent.el:6:;; Maintainer: Jay Belanger <jay.p.belanger@gmail.com>
> calc/calcalg2.el:6:;; Maintainer: Jay Belanger <jay.p.belanger@gmail.com>
> calc/calcalg3.el:6:;; Maintainer: Jay Belanger <jay.p.belanger@gmail.com>
> calc/calc-alg.el:6:;; Maintainer: Jay Belanger  <jay.p.belanger@gmail.com>
> calc/calc-arith.el:6:;; Maintainer: Jay Belanger <jay.p.belanger@gmail.com>
> calc/calc-bin.el:6:;; Maintainer: Jay Belanger <jay.p.belanger@gmail.com>
>
> My suggestion would be to change this to
>
> ;; Package-maintainer: calc:Jay Belanger <jay.p.belanger@gmail.com>
>
> The `C package' command could then go through all the .el files, gather
> the package names, and allow TAB-ing over them.
>
> Alternatively, we could just put a new file into etc that lists all the
> packages and their maintainers, which would, of course, be a lot more
> efficient.

A package's maintainer is well a meta info about the package (package as
defined in ELPA sense) - whether built in or not.

I wonder whether there is an interface to inspect the meta information
about a package file.

Jambunathan K.
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