agreeing a policy for maintainers and hackageDB

[Gwern Branwen]

On 2008.06.24 10:30:39 +0300, Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho <antti-juhani at kaijanaho.fi> scribbled 1.4K characters:
> On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 10:51:43PM +0100, Duncan Coutts wrote:
> > If a few more people could read this nice short policy and say "yes that
> > looks fine, I agree" then that would be very helpful.
>
> Yes, that looks fine, I agree :)
>
> I would prefer that a missing Maintainer field were a bug in the
> metadata instead of being semantically significant.  Otherwise there
> would be no way of distinguishing between "I forgot to add my Maintainer
> line" and "I am not supporting this".
>
> --
> Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho, Jyväskylä, Finland

The alternative is worse: why is it better to have three values ('Specifically unmaintained', 'Maintained by foo', 'not specified either way/omitted field')? At least with the omitted field being significant, users can proceed knowing that if there is a maintainer of a package with omitted maintainer field, they haven't been too diligent about packaging the program.

And we already have a situation where omissions are significant. Consider the license: field. If a license isn't specified, it must, legally, be AllRightsReserved. That's the law.

--
gwern
MI6 SISDE 36800 Waihopai ple SP4 illuminati FSF cracking rico
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