Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: Deprecating and killing the concept of herds

[Rich Freeman]

On Tue, Sep 9, 2014 at 6:54 PM, Kent Fredric <kentfredric@×××××.com> wrote:
>
> On 10 September 2014 10:23, Michał Górny <mgorny@g.o> wrote:
>>
>> I don't understand your concern. I'm only saying we should stop relying
>> on that stupid out-of-repository herds.xml file and put the e-mail
>> address directly in metadata.xml. Bugzilla and bug assignment would
>> work pretty much the same -- except that you wouldn't have to scan one
>> more file to get the e-mail you're looking for.
>
>
> That sounds less like you're trying to deprecate the use of herds, and more
> like you're trying to deprecate the use of herds /in metadata.xml/.
>
> The latter strikes me as an easier sell, just the markup is more effort.
>
> If it was possible to write <herd>perl</herd>  and have some process that
> automatically upscaled that to a <maintainer> tag, that'd be cool.

If the only thing we're using herds for is as a way to populate the
maintainer field, then they really should go away.

I'd think that the whole point of having herds is so that you could
group packages together in a way OTHER than by maintainer.  We already
have the maintainer attribute to track who maintains a package. Herds
were supposed to be about grouping related packages together (like a
herd), and not keeping track of who the cattle rustlers were.

IMHO herds aren't working because:
1.  They're basically being used as another form of project, so in
addition to mail alias members and project pages it is yet another
version of who is working on what which differs from the other ways of
finding out who is working on what.

2.  They're supposed to be used to group related packages together,
but we already have categories, and there isn't just "one true way" to
group packages together anyway.  It sounds like they're a 1:many form
of tagging.

--
Rich