Since we have no consensus on a change of semantic, field extension, field renaming or deprecation in favour of something better, I came up with a doc patch (attached because Github is down) that merely describes the current practice in the wild. Some quotations from you that pull into this direction:
• "who to spam for problems with this module" • who to contact with questions or bugs (in the event that there is no bugtracker) • Author is probably best as "contact point." • I always feel uneasy to put my name/email address into "author" when all I'm doing is keeping the module in working condition on CPAN. If you read the patch's prose carefully, it sounds kind of vague as I wanted to avoid MUSTs and SHOULDs. Any comments welcome.
From 8d3102ece70c0e9feefae351eea75d08f24de685 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: =?UTF-8?q?Lars=20D=C9=AA=E1=B4=87=E1=B4=84=E1=B4=8B=E1=B4=8F=E1=B4=A1=20=E8=BF=AA=E6=8B=89=E6=96=AF?= <da...@cpan.org>
Date: Fri, 30 Oct 2009 17:14:33 +0100
Subject: [PATCH] clarify current practice of author field
---
META-spec.pod | 14 ++++++++++++--
1 files changed, 12 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
diff --git a/META-spec.pod b/META-spec.pod
index 9d535f9..b81774b 100644
--- a/META-spec.pod
+++ b/META-spec.pod
@@ -172,9 +172,19 @@ Example:
author => [ 'Ken Williams <kwilli...@cpan.org>' ]
(Spec 1.1) [required] {arrayref of strings} An arrayref indicating the
-author(s) of the distribution. The prefered form is:
+person(s) to contact concerning the distribution. The prefered form is:
- author-name <email-address>
+ contact-name <email-address>
+
+This field serves as a general contact independent of L</"resources">
+C<MailingList> and C<bugtracker>. The addressee(s) can be contacted for any
+purpose including but not limited to (security) problems with the distribution,
+questions about the distribution or bugs in the distribution.
+
+Most of the time, a distribution's original author is also the contact. When a
+distribution extends or changes ownership and is released by a different person,
+this field's content changes accordingly. Crediting the original author(s) is
+outside the scope of this metadata specification.
=head2 license
--
1.6.4
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