[gentoo-dev] ekeyword and ordering

[Aron Griffis]

Hi guys,

As some of you have noticed, I made a change recently in ekeyword that
causes ekeyword to alphabetize the keywords.  I've realized I should
have brought it up for discussion before making the change to the
program.  On that note, I apologize for unilaterally making that
change without consulting the developer body for opinions.

Here is the the fuzzy history of keywording in a nutshell.  Please
bear in mind that these bullet points happened over a period of years.

    - Daniel originally wanted them alphabetized.

    - A few people, myself included, pointed out that there's some
      valuable information available when keywords are always added to
      the end rather than being alphabetized.  In particular, the
      concept of a "maintainer arch" is possible, in which the first
      arch in the list is supposed to indicate general stability of
      the ebuild, a leader for other arches to follow.

    - Some people disagreed with the "maintainer arch" concept.  They
      felt that the arch teams do a better job of testing than some
      maintainers, and there's no point waiting for a maintainer to
      decide something is stable.

    - Some developers recently mentioned to me that alphabetizing
      would probably be fine.  At this point I felt that the tree was
      diluted enough that there was no point resisting, so I went
      ahead and made the change silently.

    - My action was questioned privately on IRC, and I realized
      I made the decision without proper discussion.  So I'm writing
      this email.

Honestly, the arguments aren't very strong in either direction.
I think everybody understands this, but nonetheless people have their
preferences.  Here are some of the basic arguments:

    alpha
    -----------------------------
    - looks nicer (subjective)
    - easier to tell at a glance if a given keyword is in the list

    append
    -----------------------------
    - slightly less cvs/rsync traffic
    - allows "maintainer arch" to continue until another solution is
      produced, for those who still depend on that method
    - some developers are accustomed to the "append" method and don't want
      things to change, at least not without discussion

I am willing to revert the ekeyword change if that is what devs would
prefer, but I won't make the change without a discussion on -dev,
which was my mistake last time.  Your thoughts?

If the thread isn't obviously unified one direction or the other,
I guess we'll eventually put this up to a developer or manager vote
(I'm not sure which is appropriate)

Regards,
Aron

--
Aron Griffis
Gentoo Linux Developer