Re: [gentoo-dev] Removing <herd>no-herd</herd>?

[Alec Warner]

On Sat, Sep 10, 2011 at 1:22 AM, Markos Chandras <hwoarang@g.o> wrote:
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> On 10/09/2011 11:15 πμ, Mike Gilbert wrote:
>> On Sat, Sep 10, 2011 at 4:04 AM, Markos Chandras
>> <hwoarang@g.o> wrote:
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>>> On 10/09/2011 11:01 πμ, Michał Górny wrote:
>>>> Hello,
>>>>
>>>> Is there a real reason to have <herd>no-herd</herd>? As I see
>>>> it, it's just an ugly hack which all programs have to learn and
>>>> hack for no benefit.
>>>>
>>> What is the problem with that? Why is it an ugly hack?
>>>
>>
>> To a simple program/user, it basically says that the package
>> belongs to a herd called "no-herd", rather than not belonging to
>> any herd.
> Well it is pretty obvious that no-herd means errr no herd.
>
>>
>> For example, in IRC, willikins tries to look up the members of
>> "no-herd" when you do !meta -v because the bot lacks a special
>> exception for this odd-ball value.
> Just because willikins behaves like that does not justify the removal
> of this tag. God knows how many utilites and scripts are out there
> using the no-herd tag from metadata.

I want to comment briefly here because I think this affects the
project a fair bit and I'm not talking specifically about
metadata.dtd. Projects need to be able to fix mistakes made in the
past. Backwards compatibility is important but it is not some holy
grail that we should require all the time. Sometimes the choices we
made were wrong and we should be free to fix them.

We see this in upstream packages when ABI changes happen. Sometimes an
old function was written poorly, or is no longer needed. Libraries
change, packages are broken, and then they are fixed.

I don't mean to say 'never worry about breaking stuff.' In this
particular case I'm sure if important tools are broken by removing
no-herd they will be fixed (because important tools need to work...as
it turns out.) I find it difficult to conceive of a situation where a
machine would be broken by this change; so I am less worried about it.

-A

>
>>
>> I would say that each package needs to have at least one herd or
>> maintainer (which may be maintainer-needed or maintainer-wanted).
>>
> Well, you can easily assign your packages to dozen of herds and still
> be the only one who touches them. So what's the point? Just to pretend
> that the package is supported by an entire herd?
>
> - --
> Regards,
> Markos Chandras / Gentoo Linux Developer / Key ID: B4AFF2C2
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