[Qgis-community-team] Plugin author emails after the GDPR apocalypse

[Richard Duivenvoorde]

On 06/28/2018 09:15 PM, Maik Riechert wrote:
> I'd like to ask again what the purpose of this email address is since I
> got different answers so far. I was told it was for "administrative
> purposes" only. What does this mean exactly? And is it true? From the
> above discussion it seems the purpose is more wide. My main confusion is
> also: What about the email address of the osgeo account? Isn't that
> enough for administrative purposes? Why is it not used?

Hi Maik,

One reason I know is that we feel sort of responsible for the QGIS
plugins, so we (as PSC/QGIS community) think we have to be able to
contact plugin authors in case of problems (and during approval proces
of a plugin (...though that often goes via tickets in issue tracker).

Another reason is when somebody wants to take over maintenance of a
'stale' plugin. We always tell a new dev / wannebee-owner to first
contact the old owner for approval before 'taking over' a plugin...

But I think we (technically) could maybe try to keep it more 'secret'?
Though it is easier to just have them in the database for
plugins.qgis.org so that one can for example sent an email when your
plugin is approved or not. Not putting it in the metadata.txt/plugin.zip
would (I think) change the way we retrieve such info?

Using the osgeo (or qgis) email account seems a possibility (though the
redmine database is full with fake (non activated) email addresses
too).. and I'm not sure if we have enough/store information to connect
the osgeo-id to the login account (as: do we store the logged in osgeo-id)?

Note that the plugins site is: https://github.com/qgis/qgis-django, and
indeed we use the osgeo ldap service to authenticate.

As always: a lot is (technically) possible, we just need time (or hands,
hint hint) to do it :-)

Regards,

Richard Duivenvoorde

Ps reasons for getting different answers here, is just 'hey, we are
human': all friendly people here try to answer questions, there is no
Corporate Communication Department authorizing the answers given :-)