Subject: bug#48592: [PATCH 0/2] Support plural forms of Author and Maintainer library headers

From: Jonas Bernoulli <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 23 May 2021 23:14:42 +0200

Michael Albinus <[email-masked]> writes:

> Jonas Bernoulli <[email-masked]> writes:
>
> Hi Jonas,
>
>> Are you okay with replacing lm-maintainer with lm-maintainers?
>
> Same argument, again. I have no idea, whether there is some code in the
> wild which uses (lm-header "Maintainer"). package.el does, implicitly.
>
> It would fail, if new packages arrive with the "Maintainers" keyword,
> accessed from an older Emacs.
>
> Best regards, Michael.

I see I need to be more verbose.

I made two proposals:

1) Allow writing "Authors" instead of "Author" and "Maintainers" instead
   of "Maintainer".  Everyone else in this thread thinks we shouldn't do
   that and I don't care enough to argue about it.

2) Some packages are being maintained by multiple people and those
   people are not members of some group or organization that could be
   used as a short-hand.  All of those people should be listed because
   they all do important work.  Emacs has a function whose purpose is to
   return the maintainer.  It is called lm-maintainer.  It returns just
   one maintainer, "the" maintainer.  Even if the package has multiple
   maintainers and they are all listed.  I propose that we accept the
   fact that some packages have multiple maintainers, and that we do
   that by adding a new function named lm-maintainers, which returns a
   list of maintainers.  If there is only one maintainer, it returns a
   list of length one.  There is already a function called lm-authors.
   Lets do the same for maintainers.

I have given up on (1) and would still like to do (2).

     Jonas