Re: proposal: add "packagers" field (list of strings (names)) to package definition

[Leo Famulari]

On Tue, Dec 01, 2015 at 09:12:12AM +0100, Florian Paul Schmidt wrote:
> ...and encourage its use. The intended semantics is to list people
> that have contributed to the packaging effort. The motivation behind
> this proposal is that in many free software projects attribution can
> be a major source of motivation to get people involved. Having the
> packagers be first class citizens in the package definitions (as
> opposed to the information being only implicitly available through
> e.g. "git blame") would allow things like "guix package" or the
> package list on the website to display the contributor's names.

All the contributors do get attribution in the copyright notice at the
top of each file, although that information is not linked to their
actual contributions except through git.

> And if in a standard format containing additional info like an email
> address then bug reports for a package might even get CC'ed
> automatically to the contributors (though this might have some privacy
> implications - but providing an email address or even any entry in the
> packagers field is purely opt-in).

I like the idea of using this information programatically.

> WDYT?

The nice thing about `git blame` is that it's "never wrong" — you can
easily find out who is actually invested in the relevant code based on
their actions, rather than what they claimed when putting their name in
the "maintainer" or "packager" field. That is, `git blame` shows
revealed preferences while the "maintainer" field shows rhetorical
preferences. Maybe `git blame` gets stale, but you can judge freshness
based on the age of the commits.

Plus I can see some "political" issues in the future where people lay
claim to parts of the code base and justify it based on their name being in
the packager field. Personally, I think we should avoid creating these
sorts of bureaucracies if its not necessary.

I noticed that the NixOS github has a "mention-bot" that
automatically contacts people based on `git blame` if their old code is
subject to a pull request. You can see it in action here:
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/11329

I think we should let the git repository be the single source of truth
for figuring out who is responsible for the code. If necessary, we can
build some automation around the git repo.

Thoughts?