Re: proposal: removal of OWNER

[Greg Troxel <gdt%lexort.com@localhost>]

Thomas Klausner <wiz%gatalith.at@localhost> writes:

> I propose removing the OWNER field, replacing this with MAINTAINER.
>
> I think the intention of OWNER, when it was introduced, was to protect
> packages deep in the infrastructure by emphasizing that they should
> not be touched by non-MAINTAINERs.
>
> However, no infrastructure package still sets OWNER, and MAINTAINER
> defaults to pkgsrc-users a lot.
>
> So I think it doesn't make sense to keep this difference alive and
> propose removing OWNER, replacing it with MAINTAINER.

OWNER made sense for packages that were so critical and so hard to
understand that incorrect changes could break everything.  There's
nothing critical in the current list.  The closest thing is pkg_chk, and
that's relatively easy to understand and trivial to revert.  Also in
pkgtools is pkglint4, but I bet nobody has even tried to modify it and
noticed it has OWNER set, but rather only people egrepping for how many
OWNER variables we have :-)

> I'd like to emphasize that this still means that non-trivial change to
> packages should be passed by MAINTAINERs.

Indeed; that's already our documented norm and mostly but not always
honored.  I don't think it's a good idea for us to use OWNER to work
around problems with people not adequately respecting MAINTAINER, if
that's what's going on.

The other side of the coin is that being MAINTAINER is signing up to be
the steward of the package for the good of pkgsrc users in general,
which means some blend of keeping the package up to date, CVE patches,
filing patches they add upstream, etc., and being rapidly cooperative
with others wanting to do that when you haven't.  Of course, those
changes should be just those changes, and not random rototills mixed in.

> I plan to implement the change in a week.
>
> Comments?

Sounds good to me.