[gentoo-dev] RFC: Deprecating and killing herds in metadata.xml

[Jeroen Roovers]

On Tue, 9 Sep 2014 21:45:49 +0200
Michał Górny <mgorny@g.o> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> Let's keep it short: I think herds don't serve any special purpose
> nowadays. Their existence is mostly resulting in lack of consistency
> and inconveniences.

On IRC we seem to have found some consensus about metadata.xml:

1 ) We should
1a) deprecate the <herd> tag in metadata.xml (that's 17,856 files or
    so?) in favour of 
1b) a conversion to their respective <maintainer> tags 
1c) where the <email> tag serves the same purpose as <herd> but
    bypasses herds.xml completely by just using the intended alias and
    not the name of the herd (which some developers might want to keep
in the <name> tag for whatever purpose).

2 ) Important to note is that this makes the order in which tags in
    metadata.xml are used in assigning bugs is made more explicit and
    simple. Previously the first <maintainer> or in its absence the
    first <herd> would be the Assignee, and the rest would be CC'd. This
    changes now to a much simpler scheme where
2a) the first <maintainer> is always the Assignee, and the rest is
    CC'd, so that
2b) instances where metadata.xml lists a <maintainer> tag after a
    <herd> tag would need to have the order fixed: the <herd> tags that
    are converted to <maintainer> tags should be moved to a place in
    the file after the original first <maintainer> tag.

3 ) We end up with metadata.xml files that have no <herd> tags and only
    <maintainer> tags.
3a) herds.xml is now unimportant in assigning bugs.
3b) Tools that use herds.xml no longer need a copy of herds.xml to look
    up who is responsible for a package.
3c) herds.xml can be safely kept up to date and used elsewhere and can
    be safely phases out in time.

4 ) We might achieve the <herd> => <maintainer> conversion by
4a) setting up repoman to deny commits that keep <herd> or
4b) setting up repoman to automatically convert the entire thing
4c) both of which might end up taking a good while to complete, or
4d) do an automated mass conversion of the entire gentoo-x86 tree.


5a) All ontological discussion of the meaning of herds and projects is
    entirely unrelated - we're just looking to make it much easier to
look
    up metadata about packages using as few resources as possible.
5b) All ontological discussion of the meaning of herds and projects is
    instantly rendered a lot less important. We have less need to bring
    this up every year or so.


Corrections and comment, please.


     jer