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... or why just changing stuff is not enough: |
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|
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A few days ago I was told that |
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http://euscan.gentooexperimental.org/herds/ was displaying an empty |
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list. Which is annoying because people sometimes want to see what |
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upstream updates are available for their herd. |
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Well, we renamed herd to project. Because reasons. |
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I don't care how it is named, but this change broke euscan in a |
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user-visible way. Now I could just try to rename things there too, but |
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that won't work: |
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|
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euscan uses gentoolkit for parsing metadata.xml and herds.xml |
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(Since herds.xml is basically unmaintained cruft at this point this will |
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break soon anyway ... but ...) |
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Changing gentoolkit to use projects.xml instead of herds.xml won't be a |
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simple migration since the data organization changed. |
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Now instead of looking up [metadata.xml] -> (herd name) -> [herds.xml] |
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-> email it goes backwards: |
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[metadata.xml] -> (maintainer type=project) -> email -> [projects.xml] |
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-> Project name |
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|
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Since this involves XML and python's ElementTree library it's a |
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nontrivial change that also removes a few now useless helpers |
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(_get_herd_email has no reason to be, but we'd need a _get_herd_name |
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helper instead. Err, get_proj ... ah well, whatever name works) |
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And all that just so (1) gentoolkit output works and (2) euscan updates |
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properly. Both of which I don't really care about much, but now that |
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I've invested ~4h into debugging and trying to fix it I'm a tiny bit |
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IRRITATED. |
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Please, next time someone has the brilliant idea of changing stuff just |
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to change it (I still don't see a reason why we had to change |
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metadata.xml?), it should be required that support tools are fixed |
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*before* the change, and working versions released. This avoids grumpy |
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people and makes it harder for those that change things to head-in-sand |
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and claim everything works as expected when it obviously doesn't. |
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And this, again, supports my default phrase: "Change is not Progress", |
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because now we have regressions and user-visible breakage, and it's hard |
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to qualify how the change actually improved anything because we haven't |
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actually *finished* the change. (Like the git migration that is still |
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ongoing ...) |
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Do the needfull! Be of excellent moral person! |
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