RFC: Add a maintainer field
I've thought about this basically since I started contributing more here, but apparently I never got around to writing it down.
I'd like to add the notion of app maintainers to fdroiddata (basically a name and an email address). This information could be used for a variety of things, but mainly it allows marking who'd be responsible for responding to bugs/build failures/update requests for a package.
I also imagine getting notified by email for build failures of "your" packages, etc.
So there's the pratical reason, what we could do with this info but there's also the intention behind this that we could involve more upstream authors (if they agree) into the f-droid packaging process. Or generally have a broader set of people being responsible for packages and not a handful of people being responsible for all packages.
Now the question is how do we want to store that information. There are two things we can do:
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Store it in a separate txt file at top level, sorted by person and listing all packages under them. The linux kernel does this and I know at least a few projects that adopted this or something similar: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/MAINTAINERS, https://github.com/buildroot/buildroot/blob/master/DEVELOPERS, ...
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We store that information directly in the package metadata, adding a
Maintainers
field which allows listing multiple people. The problem here might be that we duplicate this information (like email) for each entry.
So we might actually do a combination of 1. and 2. where we have a name (or nickname) in the metadata file and then still a maintainers.txt file which lists email addresses and potential other information (website, irc matrix handle, ...)
Pinging @IzzySoft @licaon-kter @Rudloff @relan @eighthave @uniqx @mimi89999 for feedback.