future of developers list

[Josip Rodin <joy@gkvk.hr>]

Hi,

I think that the underlying point that all the devel/people discussions
prove is that extracting developer information from Packages files is flawed
by design -- the Maintainer fields are vaguely suitable, but certainly
neither flexible nor consistent enough for our purposes.

We should eventually rewrite the engine that generates the page to take the
developers' database data per objectclass=debiandeveloper and the developer
applicant database data (I'm told that this is definitely planned to be done
as part of the NM system) as authoritative, and then cross-reference that
with the packages data to find lists of packages maintained by each of those
developers. This cross-referencing (substring matching, really) would
include searching for all the variants we already search for now.

The database entries with no packages for new developers would be skipped;
such entries for existing developers would be printed on a separate web page
or marked differently on this web page, which nicely fixes the issue of not
distinguishing/recognizing emeritus developers.

Another added benefit would be that we could then extend our LDAP database
schemas to include another field for people's names in native character set,
which would nicely fix the problem with Japanese names -- the non-Japanese
web pages would print the names of these developers in the western way, and
the Japanese web pages would print them in the Japanese way.

-- 
     2. That which causes joy or happiness.