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

[Ludovic Courtès]

Andy Wingo <address@hidden> skribis:

> On Tue 01 Dec 2015 08:12, Florian Paul Schmidt <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> ...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.
>
> Since you ask for opinions, -1 from me :)
>
> Currently Guix packages are more-or-less collectively owned.
> Introducing this field implies to me an introduction of ownership of
> packages.  Ownership has a number of negative effects: it can inhibit
> casual fixes and it can introduce unnecessary conflicts.

I agree.

For a while I wondered whether attaching names to packages via the
‘maintainers’ field would help people feel responsible, and thus help
keep packages maintained (but obviously this could only be used once the
ratio of the number of contributors to the number of packages has become
reasonable.)

I’ve come to the same conclusion as you: that collective maintenance is
even better, and actually works reasonably well.  The whole distro is
our commons.

Cheers,
Ludo’.