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

[Steven J. Long]

On Tue, Sep 30, 2014, Jeroen Roovers wrote:
> If people are that attached to <herd> then we should apparently fix it
> instead of removing it, possibly by making it closely resemble
> <maintainer>.

Well to do that you need to clear up that "ontological discussion"
which is nothing more than defining what it is you're tracking.
Your first mail effectively dealt with every listing of herd as a tag
for people (ie maintainer tag), and concluded with "we just want a way
to lookup packages."

I don't want a long debate about it either: it'd just be nice to know
what you're trying to do upfront. It seems like a herd is a group of
both packages (eg webapps) and the people who care about them, via the
mail alias, which could be users as well as developers.(?)

The latter is slightly different to a project, which is a group of
developers, afaict. Is that difference what was meant by "team" which
I read somewhere in this thread, or is that the project, or something
else altogether?

Anyhow, I'd just deal with the fact that herd means what it means, a
grouping of packages formally, *and* an associated mail alias, which
(i assume) is what people look up with willikins' !herd. (Conceptually
the latter would be cleaner as !team, and !herd would tell you the
packages or direct to a url if many, but it's a bit late for that;
usage habits are too ingrained.)

And ofc document that, as well as what a project etc mean in one
place; I'm sure I got much of the above wrong in factual terms, but
those are the definitions missing from the proposal, that make it
hard to follow. It's not clear what problem you're trying to solve,
apart from removing all herd tags from every ebuild's metadata.xml.

Regards
steveL
-- 
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