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Re: master bef1be8: Fixes for "Maintainer:" and related lines
From: |
Paul Eggert |
Subject: |
Re: master bef1be8: Fixes for "Maintainer:" and related lines |
Date: |
Mon, 20 May 2019 08:39:34 -0700 |
User-agent: |
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/60.6.1 |
On 5/20/19 7:40 AM, Glenn Morris wrote:
It is long-standing Emacs convention that if there is
no Maintainer header, the Author is the maintainer. See elisp node
"Conventional Headers for Emacs Libraries".
I didn't know that. However, that node doesn't match existing practice
as it goes on to say, "Some files in Emacs use ‘FSF’ for the
maintainer. This means that the original author is no longer
responsible for the file, and that it is maintained as part of Emacs"
despite the fact that no files in the Emacs source code use "FSF" for
the maintainer (either before or after my recent patch).
Also, it appears that many (most?) people didn't know about and didn't
follow the convention. Not only did the convention not come up in
discussion until now, it's quite common to see comment pairs like the
following, which are the first five remaining instances of "Maintainer:"
lines in Emacs's .el files (sorted by file name):
;; Author: Markus Rost <address@hidden>
;; Maintainer: Markus Rost <address@hidden>
;; Author: David Ponce <address@hidden>
;; Maintainer: David Ponce <address@hidden>
;; Author: David Ponce <address@hidden>
;; Maintainer: David Ponce <address@hidden>
;; Author: Richard Kim <address@hidden>
;; Maintainer: Richard Kim <address@hidden>
;; Author: Kevin Gallagher <address@hidden>
;; Maintainer: Kevin Gallagher <address@hidden>
and this indicates the authors were following the opposite convention
that a file without a listed maintainer is being maintained collectively.
All in all I think it'd lessen confusion and simplify maintenance if we
used "Maintainer:" for contacting current maintainers who aren't authors
and don't normally read bug reports. Something like the attached
proposed patch, say?
0001-Adjust-Maintainer-doc.patch
Description: Text Data