Re: Sending diffs of `elpa' to the respective maintainers

[Stefan Monnier]

>> It would be good to change it so it manages the maintfile itself.
>> Or else couple it with a cron job that builds the maintfile.
> That's easily done. Just need a thing that parses packages/*.el for
> "Maintainer" or "Author" headers.  I suggest doing it via cron, so that
> it is not necessary to scan all packages on every commit.  Need to watch
> for changed addresses though, and need to undo any address munging
> people might have used (or require them not to do so).

No need: just rebuild the file from scratch each time.

> The only issuse I see is if a new package is installed and then
> a change is committed very soon after, before the maintfile gets
> updated. Maybe updating the maintfile should be part of the process of
> installing a new package.

Maybe if the maintainer address is not found, the forwarding script
should trigger a refresh of the maintainer list.

> Maybe someone on this list will feel inspired to write this piece...

Hopefully.

>> as an error (i.e. tho I guess it would be the cron job's duty to
>> detect/handle it).  I.e. we need to distinguish "missing maintainer
>> data" from "maintainer decided not to want it".
>> I'd guess the "opt-out" would be a separate list of "opt-out email
>> addresses".
> I'd suggest just commenting out the relevant line in the maintainers
> file.

Not sure what you mean, but in any case, we can hope that noone will
want to opt-out, so we may never need to solve this problem.


        Stefan