Structured maintainers

[moretea]

Motivation for this change

Enables having proper metadata about maintainers, which is useful for NixOS/rfcs#19 (maintainers file) / NixOS/rfcs#21 (PR's on Hydra).

Example

nix-instantiate --strict --eval . -A pkgs.keen4.meta.maintainers
[ { GitHub = "edolstra"; IRC = "niksnut"; email = "eelco.dolstra@logicblox.com"; name = "Eelco Dolstra"; } ]

Things done

Verified that not everything is completely broken by running:

nix-build nixos/tests/boot.nix 
nix-build nixos/tests/firefox.nix

Why the manipulation of the data structure at the bottom of the file?

If addGitHub would not be applied to the attrset, then keys of the attrset cannot be observed when accessing them via pkgs.my_pkg.meta.maintainers.

Remaining questions

• Is setting IRC to null if not defined desired behavior?

[edolstra]

Why is this needed? ... considered harmful.

[edolstra]

This seems overly complicated to me. Why do we need that all that funky _structuredMaintainers and ... business? I would just change lib/maintainers.nix to return a attrset of attrsets.

[moretea]

I would very much prefer to only have that!

My reasoning for implementing a flag is based on:

1. This structured data is very useful for the RFCs 19&21 to ping the correct maintainers.
2. I assumed that hydra depends on pkgs.my_pkg.meta.maintainers to be a list of email addresses.

Having a flag will allows us to get to use this data before support is added to Hydra.

[moretea]

We discussed this on IRC, and we'll just move to the new format, after which @edolstra will fix Hydra.

[FRidh]

I would like to take this further (see #34842 (comment)). @moretea did you use a script to generate the attr sets?

[7c6f434c]

I think the feature has been implemented somehow, so any PRs about maintainer list structure should be discussed relative to what we have now.