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

[Leo Famulari]

I should add a disclaimer: take my point of view with a grain of salt. There 
are other Guix contributors with a much broader perspective on the project. I'm 
still a newbie!

On December 1, 2015 12:35:18 PM EST, Leo Famulari <address@hidden> wrote:
>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?