Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: Luis Francisco Araujo <araujo@g.o>
To: gentoo-dev@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: About herds and their non-existant use
Date: Thu, 22 May 2008 07:57:47
Message-Id: 48351D7E.9060407@gentoo.org
In Reply to: [gentoo-dev] Re: About herds and their non-existant use by "Tiziano Müller"
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4 Tiziano Müller wrote:
5 | Marius Mauch wrote:
6 |
7 |> Moving the discussion to -dev per leios request.
8 |>
9 |> On Wed, 21 May 2008 23:42:19 +0200
10 |> Marius Mauch <genone@g.o> wrote:
11 |>
12 |>> As this topic jus came up in #-dev, and most people there seemed to
13 |>> agree with me I thought it might be worth to bring this topic up
14 |>> again. The topic is that I think that the whole 'herd' concept we're
15 |>> using is a huge mess and should be removed. Now before eveyone starts
16 |>> screaming, lets look at what this concept actually is, as many people
17 |>> are quite confused by it:
18 |>>
19 |>> 1) a herd is a group of packages (not a group of people)
20 |>> 2) the herds.xml file is used to assign people and mail aliases as
21 |>> maintainers of a given herd. Unfortuntely the syntax there give
22 |>> the impression that those people/mail aliases actually form the herd
23 |>> 3) the <herd> tag in metadata.xml is used to assign a package to a
24 |>> certain group.
25 |>> 4) the <maintainer> tag in metadata.xml can be used to assign
26 |>> individual maintainers for a package in addition to/instead of the
27 |>> herd maintainers
28 |>> 5) the combination of 2), 3) and 4) is used to determine the
29 |>> maintainers of a given package
30 |>>
31 |>> Now most people will be familiar with 5) to some degree, and that is
32 |>> actually the only valid use case for the herd concept that I'm aware
33 |>> of. Or has anyone some use case where you'd like to know what herd a
34 |>> package belongs to, but don't care about by whom that herd is
35 |>> maintained?
36 |>> If we can agree that this is the only real use case for the herd
37 |>> concept, then I think the concept is quite useless as it's just a
38 |>> redundant layer of indirection. You could just list mail aliases
39 |>> directly as maintainers, without having to consult herds.xml first.
40 | While I think the herds concecpt is somewhat useless, I'd rather like
41 to see
42 | something like this instead:
43 |
44 | <maintainer>
45 | <team>foobar</team>
46 | </maintainer>
47 |
48 | This makes it clear that it is a team instead of a person (where <name>
49 | would have been used)
50 |
51 | And the herds.xml isn't completely useless, but I'd rather name it
52 teams.xml
53 | and list the teams there. This way we can validated the team mentioned in
54 | <team>...</team> against the list of available teams and make sure the
55 | complete thing is valid (can be done in the current metadata.dtd or in a
56 | future metadata.xsd).
57 | (If we're gonna re-use the <email>...</email> element for the
58 herd-alias, we
59 | can never validate it. And I'm personally for the: "if something can be
60 | automatically validated, it should be")
61 |
62
63 I am also for renaming or making clear that these are 'teams' instead f
64 'herds'[0].
65
66 Unless a team can maintain several herds, I find the term 'herd'
67 confusing and better understood as 'team' instead.
68
69 My 2 cents.
70
71 [0]http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/metastructure/herds/herds.xml
72
73
74 - --
75
76 Luis F. Araujo "araujo at gentoo.org"
77 Gentoo Linux
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Replies

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[gentoo-dev] Re: About herds and their non-existant use flameeyes@gmail.com (Diego 'Flameeyes' =?utf-8?Q?Petten=C3=B2?=)