Re: [gentoo-dev] Please use land-misc herd where appropriate! No no-herd madness!!!

[Paul de Vrieze]

On Friday 08 October 2004 08:33, George Shapovalov wrote:
> Particular citation (skipping tags):
> "There must at least be one herd subtag. The contents of this tag should be
> the name of be a herd as specified in the herds.xml file. It must occur at
> least once. Besides being member of a herd, a package can also be
> maintained directly."
>
Unfortunately the maintainers of most herds have this to mean that the 
maintainer must also be member of the team that maintains that herd. Most 
maintainers don't really want to do that, they jus want to maintain the 
package. I can also tell you the rationale behind this. It is to ensure that 
packages keep being maintained even when the maintainer leaves / gets hit by 
a truck / ...

> The rationale being (and that was touched upon in those old discussions
> multiple times) that there always is a fall-back. Thus strictly speaking
> no-herd is against the policy as this is not a valid herd (or even not a
> herd at all).

I designed it as a stopgap as initially there were no herds at all so people 
should be able to express that they maintained some package without needing 
to immediately find a herd.

> Observe also that no-herd is nowhere to be found on that page. This is not
> an omission but rather a "simptome". There was no mention of no-herd
> entries when the policy was developed and metadata format worked out.
> no-herd entries started to appear later on without much fuss. They were
> noticed and the issue brought up and according to what I remember no real
> decision was made on them. The general feeling I have is that they were
> "tolerated" by more strict policy followers with the understanding that
> this is a temporary measure and we should try to minimize their use and get
> rid of them whenever possible.

I tell you this is exactly the idea.

Paul

-- 
Paul de Vrieze
Gentoo Developer
Mail: pauldv@g.o
Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net