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 <[email protected]> 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?
