Re: MAINTAINERS in svn -- have it or don't get any SVN account approved

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Wed, 2007-08-08 at 00:36 +0200, Olav Vitters wrote:
> Please read if you are the maintainer of a module in svn.gnome.org:
> 
> The new accounts system will store maintainer information in LDAP.
> Meaning, it'll know who the maintainers are for some module. People will
> not be able to request SVN accounts for modules without such
> information. To add this info in LDAP we need every module to have a
> MAINTAINERS file in svn.
> Note: Modules without such a file will be ignored (people cannot
> request SVN accounts for such modules).
> 
> So in short:
> 1. Please ensure the following file exists in your SVN repos:
>    /trunk/MAINTAINERS (no other place is ok)
> 2. The content resembles the following:
> 
> Some Name
> E-mail: some email-address invalid
> Userid: svn-account-name
> 
> 
> Note that the userid is really important. Otherwise ensure that the
> E-mail address is the one your @svn.g.o alias forwards to.

I think it's great to have a common machine-readable format
for our MAINTAINERS files.  In fact, I was wanting just such
a thing a while ago when I was writing my now-dormant Pulse
project (not to be confused with PulseAudio).

But as others have noted, this format just doesn't allow us
to put into our MAINTAINERS files the information we have
been putting in there.  A few examples:

Evolution and gnome-doc-utils (among, I'm sure, many others)
use headings that tell you what each maintainer is responsible
for.  This is very useful information.

In at least gnome-doc-utils and gnome-user-docs, I've put a
big note at the top telling people to use the mailing list,
and giving them the email address and URL to the archives.
Human beings sometimes look at MAINTAINERS files to figure
out whom to contact, and I'd really rather people use the
mailing list than contact me directly.

Metacity has big descriptive paragraphs for each maintainer,
telling you exactly what that maintainer does.

I'm sure there are other examples.  These are just the ones
that I knew off the top of my head.  Could we please work on
creating a syntax that allows us to express all this?

--
Shaun