[gentoo-project] About herds and their non-existant use

[Marius Mauch]

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.

This would have a number of benefits:
- you no longer have to look at herds.xml to determine the actual
maintainers of a given package (as herd-name and associated mail alias
don't always match)
- it would simplify bug assignment rules, as the current case where a
package has both a <herd> and a <maintainer> tag in metadata.xml no
longer exists
- eliminate confusion about what a herd actually is
- only have one location where members of a given team are listed,
currently it's possible and quite likely that herds.xml and the mail
alias files get out of sync
- as others said in #-dev: it makes sense ;)

Now there of course are a few things to consider:
- obviously, some tools, docs and processes would have to be updated,
but that's always the case with changes
- someone said that it might no longer be obvious if a package is
maintained by an individual or a group of people. But is that really
necessary? And it's not even obvious now, as some herds are maintained
by a single person.
- when I brought this up several months ago it was mentioned that
sometimes people want to be on the mail alias of a herd, but don't want
to be listed as members (and therefore be responsible). But that can
likely be just implemented by some kind of blacklist in the relevant
tools instead of using this whole indirection layer all the time.

So, what do you think? Is there some benefit in keeping this concept, or
can we live without it and make life simpler for everyone?

Marius

-- 
Public Key at http://www.genone.de/info/gpg-key.pub

In the beginning, there was nothing. And God said, 'Let there be
Light.' And there was still nothing, but you could see a bit better.