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Tiziano Müller wrote:
| Marius Mauch wrote:
|
|> Moving the discussion to -dev per leios request.
|>
|> On Wed, 21 May 2008 23:42:19 +0200
|> Marius Mauch <genone@g.o> wrote:
|>
|>> As this topic jus came up in #-dev, and most people there seemed to
|>> agree with me I thought it might be worth to bring this topic up
|>> again. The topic is that I think that the whole 'herd' concept we're
|>> using is a huge mess and should be removed. Now before eveyone starts
|>> screaming, lets look at what this concept actually is, as many people
|>> are quite confused by it:
|>>
|>> 1) a herd is a group of packages (not a group of people)
|>> 2) the herds.xml file is used to assign people and mail aliases as
|>> maintainers of a given herd. Unfortuntely the syntax there give
|>> the impression that those people/mail aliases actually form the herd
|>> 3) the <herd> tag in metadata.xml is used to assign a package to a
|>> certain group.
|>> 4) the <maintainer> tag in metadata.xml can be used to assign
|>> individual maintainers for a package in addition to/instead of the
|>> herd maintainers
|>> 5) the combination of 2), 3) and 4) is used to determine the
|>> maintainers of a given package
|>>
|>> Now most people will be familiar with 5) to some degree, and that is
|>> actually the only valid use case for the herd concept that I'm aware
|>> of. Or has anyone some use case where you'd like to know what herd a
|>> package belongs to, but don't care about by whom that herd is
|>> maintained?
|>> If we can agree that this is the only real use case for the herd
|>> concept, then I think the concept is quite useless as it's just a
|>> redundant layer of indirection. You could just list mail aliases
|>> directly as maintainers, without having to consult herds.xml first.
| While I think the herds concecpt is somewhat useless, I'd rather like
to see
| something like this instead:
|
| <maintainer>
|   <team>foobar</team>
| </maintainer>
|
| This makes it clear that it is a team instead of a person (where <name>
| would have been used)
|
| And the herds.xml isn't completely useless, but I'd rather name it
teams.xml
| and list the teams there. This way we can validated the team mentioned in
| <team>...</team> against the list of available teams and make sure the
| complete thing is valid (can be done in the current metadata.dtd or in a
| future metadata.xsd).
| (If we're gonna re-use the <email>...</email> element for the
herd-alias, we
| can never validate it. And I'm personally for the: "if something can be
| automatically validated, it should be")
|

I am also for renaming or making clear that these are 'teams' instead f
'herds'[0].

Unless a team can maintain several herds, I find the term 'herd'
confusing and better understood as 'team' instead.

My 2 cents.

[0]http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/metastructure/herds/herds.xml


- --

Luis F. Araujo "araujo at gentoo.org"
Gentoo Linux

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