[ANN]: refactor author field to be more verbose, Deadline: 27.07.2018

<explain>

Explanation: In order to be transparent and allow consumers of the DB to be ready and prepared for changes in the format, we want to communicate those upfront. This issue is an attempt at rehearsing a potential process of communicating these kinds of changes. For details please check out here onward: https://github.com/nodejs/security-wg/issues/200#issuecomment-400105331 </explain>

---

We are planning to make the author attribute more verbose and easier machine readable. The format would change from the current format:

"author": "Cal Lemming" // not required

to the new format:

"author": {
    "name": "Cal Leeming", // required
    "website": null, // optional, can be null
    "username": null //  optional, can be null
} 

The discussion around this can be found in issue https://github.com/nodejs/security-wg/issues/200 The PR proposing the changes is: https://github.com/nodejs/security-wg/pull/314

If you are a consumer of this database and would like to be informed of upcomming changes, please add a comment here and we will reach out to you in the future.

If you have any suggestions or constructive feedback please join the conversation.

The PR unless someone vetos, will be merged on 27.07.2018

[evilpacket]

npm’s advisory format currently specifies name (descriptor) and url fields which covers all the various situations we’ve run into historically with nodesecurity data, which was linking to a website, twitter, GitHub, or preferred other location without having to have an extremely complicated schema.

I’ve considered making that an array to support linking to more locations, but that seems like needless complexity for an advisory.

[lirantal]

Definitely. I’d like to go ahead and document this process as well.