[oe] Package Maintenance

[Richard Purdie]

Having given this some further thought, I think the problem is we need
to do something different.

We've tried MAINTAINERS in recipes, it wasn't a success.

The current Maintainers file is ok and roughly current but doesn't have
as much visibility as we'd ideally like.


I don't think the Maintainers file is wrong as such, I think whats
missing are scripts to do something with the data. It would be useful if
we had a program which could tell us:

* Who maintains file X (be it a class/recipe/conf/sitefile etc)?
* Who last changed file X?
* Who are the contributors to file X?
* Can we easily create a subset of the metadata which is "maintained"?

If we have scripts to do this which is possible with a combination of
the Maintainers file and the SCM, maybe with some tweaks to file formats
as needed such as adding the git commit IDs I think people will start to
maintain the files more and we might get more people registering their
maintainership.


I should also mention one big reason we dropped the MAINTAINER fields
from recipes - they make no sense outside of OE. As soon as you move a
recipe into something like Poky, you don't want your name there.
Dropping the Maintainers file is easy, editing several hundred recipes
is a pain for syncing between the trees. We do want to support
initiatives like Poky, right? :)

Cheers,

Richard