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

From: Jonas Bernoulli <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 24 May 2021 10:58:54 +0200

Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]> writes:

>> [Add lm-maintainers and make lm-maintainer obsolete.]

> Fine by me as well, but:

> . I see no reason to deprecate lm-maintainer: there's nothing wrong
>   with wanting to obtain the first name in the list;
>
> . Please describe in the doc string of lm-maintainer what it does when
>   there's more than one.

The reason why I want to deprecate lm-maintainer is that this informs
users of that function that some packages may have more than one
maintainer and that it is now possible and (I dare say) encouraged to
acknowledge them all.

Sure adding a note to lm-maintainer technically accomplishes the same,
but once one has started using lm-maintainer, then one doesn't
periodically go back to see whether a new notes have been added to its
doc-string.  But something like this would do the trick of guiding the
attention towards the extended functionality and its updated
documentation:

  In package-build--desc-from-library:
  lib/package-build/package-build.el:516:26: Warning: ‘lm-maintainer’ is an
      obsolete function (as of 28.1); use ‘lm-maintainers’ instead.

Yes, there is nothing wrong with ignoring all but the first maintainer
(except of course, not properly attributing the contributions of the
others as they choose to present it), but it seems to me that having to:

  - (lm-maintainer)
  + (car (lm-maintainers))

is perfectly acceptable in cases where only "the" maintainer can be
mentioned because there is not enough room to display the names of all
maintainers.  (So it is still a good idea to list the primus inter pares
maintainer first.)

     Cheers,
     Jonas