Maintainer overview

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen]

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 <address@hidden>
whitespace.el:6:;; Maintainer: Vinicius Jose Latorre <address@hidden>
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 <address@hidden>
calc/calc-aent.el:6:;; Maintainer: Jay Belanger <address@hidden>
calc/calcalg2.el:6:;; Maintainer: Jay Belanger <address@hidden>
calc/calcalg3.el:6:;; Maintainer: Jay Belanger <address@hidden>
calc/calc-alg.el:6:;; Maintainer: Jay Belanger  <address@hidden>
calc/calc-arith.el:6:;; Maintainer: Jay Belanger <address@hidden>
calc/calc-bin.el:6:;; Maintainer: Jay Belanger <address@hidden>

My suggestion would be to change this to

;; Package-maintainer: calc:Jay Belanger <address@hidden>

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.

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
  bloggy blog http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/