Re: [gentoo-dev] Uncoordinated changes

[Michał Górny]

Dear Ignorant Patrick,

On Thu, 11 Feb 2016 21:15:34 +0100
Patrick Lauer <patrick@g.o> wrote:

> ... or why just changing stuff is not enough:
>
> A few days ago I was told that
> http://euscan.gentooexperimental.org/herds/ was displaying an empty
> list. Which is annoying because people sometimes want to see what
> upstream updates are available for their herd.
>
> Well, we renamed herd to project. Because reasons.

No, we didn't. Herd was collection a packages. Project is a collection
of developers. Project coexisted with herds for a long time. As it was
explained already in length. Multiple times.

> I don't care how it is named, but this change broke euscan in a
> user-visible way. Now I could just try to rename things there too, but
> that won't work:
>
> euscan uses gentoolkit for parsing metadata.xml and herds.xml
> (Since herds.xml is basically unmaintained cruft at this point this will
> break soon anyway ... but ...)
> Changing gentoolkit to use projects.xml instead of herds.xml won't be a
> simple migration since the data organization changed.
>
> Now instead of looking up [metadata.xml] -> (herd name) -> [herds.xml]
> -> email it goes backwards:
> [metadata.xml] -> (maintainer type=project) -> email -> [projects.xml]
> -> Project name
>
> Since this involves XML and python's ElementTree library it's a
> nontrivial change that also removes a few now useless helpers
> (_get_herd_email has no reason to be, but we'd need a _get_herd_name
> helper instead. Err, get_proj ... ah well, whatever name works)
>
> And all that just so (1) gentoolkit output works and (2) euscan updates
> properly. Both of which I don't really care about much, but now that
> I've invested ~4h into debugging and trying to fix it I'm a tiny bit
> IRRITATED.

You are completely incorrect, as you have been told already multiple
times. People would really appreciate if you spent at least a little
part of the time you spend complaining, inventing issues and insulting
others listening to what they're telling you.

So let me repeat, again. euscan works. Want packages from Python
project? Then select the appropriate maintainer from the 'maintainers'
section:

http://euscan.gentooexperimental.org/maintainers/python@g.o/

Done. Was it that hard? Now the big surprise: you didn't have to create
some convoluted logic to get that! You don't need projects.xml to get
that! Of course, you'd know that if you would listen for a single
minute instead of throwing insults at others.

> Please, next time someone has the brilliant idea of changing stuff just
> to change it (I still don't see a reason why we had to change
> metadata.xml?), it should be required that support tools are fixed
> *before* the change, and working versions released. This avoids grumpy
> people and makes it harder for those that change things to head-in-sand
> and claim everything works as expected when it obviously doesn't.

The fact is: things *work as expected*. If you have problem accepting
reality as it is, then it's your fault, not ours. Herds no longer
exist. Everything is based on *maintainers* now. Tools are not supposed
to magically turn project information back into herd-oriented design.

As I said before, please direct any further complaints directly to
the Council, and stop insulting the messenger. The Council has banned
herds explicitly before I even started working on GLEP 67. It was
the guideline I had to follow.

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny
<http://dev.gentoo.org/~mgorny/>