author information on dist page should more accurately reflect the actual author

[doy]

So, this is a somewhat radical break from the traditional way CPAN data is presented, but it seems to me like it'd be more useful to try harder to find a more reasonable value for "the author of the dist" than just "whoever uploaded this dist most recently". The current way things are presented leads to confusion in a lot of cases where someone might just make a one-off release to fix a minor bug, but then they are presented as the primary author from that point forward until someone else makes a release. The person who uploaded the most recent version of the dist is still useful information, and should still be presented, but less prominently.

Either the author or x_authority data in the META file seem like they would be more likely to give a useful value for people who are actually interested in who to contact about the module. If those aren't considered to be sufficient, we could add another x_maintainer key for this purpose.

This would also make things line up better with the way that contributor data is presented - currently (as far as I can tell), people listed in author are not supposed to be listed under x_contributors, and so if someone other than the actual author makes a release, that person will be listed twice (once as the person who made the release and once as a contributor) and the author will not be listed at all, which seems like an fairly serious error in the way things are presented. See https://metacpan.org/release/Bread-Board for an example of this - I made the most recent release, but I'm listed under contributors and stevan isn't (because stevan is the actual author).

I don't really have any firm ideas for how this should work, but I think it's an idea worth exploring, and so I'm interested in seeing what other people think about it. Does this sound like something that's worth doing?

[rwstauner]

I agree wholeheartedly and would like to see us explore better ways of
presenting author information.

I felt the same when I got co-maint on Ovid's Test::Aggregate and I even
made a re-release with his name duplicated in x_contributors so that he'd
show up there somewhere.

Something that could probably be done without much difficulty would be to
place an "authors" list above the "contributors" list since the author meta
key can be an array. We don't have to bother with merging and de-duping
and the separation would be a better representation of who does what.

Better might be to display the primary author photo and maybe the
releaser's photo and then have the two lists of others below. Trying to
show pics for the whole authors array could cause long page flows for some
dists, but we could try it. It would have to overflow vertically.

I'm sure we could come up with better ideas. I would like to see us
improve this.

[karenetheridge]

We already show pictures for all the contributors (although it is hidden behind a link), so something similar for authors (but not hidden) probably wouldn't be that horrible.

[doy]

@karenetheridge I think it should actually be the authors list that are the primary thing shown, and the current releaser that is shown below that similar to contributors but not hidden.

[ranguard]

Moved to wish list: https://github.com/CPAN-API/cpan-api/wiki/Wishlist