Re: [gentoo-dev] Inconsistent and messy layout of team maintainership in Gentoo

[Daniel Campbell]

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On 09/17/2015 12:40 PM, Michał Górny wrote:
> Dnia 2015-09-16, o godz. 23:25:33 Michał Górny <mgorny@g.o>
> napisał(a):
>
>> So, what are your thoughts for unmessing this?
>
> For completeness, a semi-conservative idea that could be
> implemented relatively easily.
>
> 1. Stop caring about names. If people want to call it a project,
> let it be a project. If people want to call it a herd, let it be a
> herd. Whatever. Let's assume all of them are some kind of teams.
>
> 2. Provide a single machine-readable, developer-editable database
> of all teams.
>
> 2a. All teams in the database are uniquely identified by their
> e-mail address.
>
> 2b. The database can have some free-form fields for extra team
> info, like type (project, herd, whatever if you really care),
> human-readable name, description, homepage (-> wiki project page).
>
> 2c. The database explicitly lists all team members, possibly with
> their role (lead/member). Optionally, we may allow listing
> sub-teams.
>
> 2d. Project wiki pages should pull from this database. Otherwise,
> we consider the wiki project members lists useless and stop caring
> about them.
>
> 3. Mail aliases correspond to all teams. We can implicitly append
> all team members to them but we also allow adding extra people
> interested in the bug mail there. Like we do right now.
>
> 4. Only team members listed in the database are considered relevant
> to the package maintenance. Other mail alias members are
> considered spectators without any extra privileges.
>
> 5. Package metadata lists e-mail addresses of all maintainers,
> either people or teams.
>
> 5a. Each maintainer e-mail that is not a person must have a
> corresponding team database entry (and a mail alias, obviously).
>
>
> Now, for some practical least-effort implementation we can pretty
> much reuse the tools we have now (and gain in terms of
> compatibility).
>
> The team listing is pretty much what herds.xml is right now. We
> stop caring about <name/> and start using <email/> as the unique
> identifier. We make herds.xml obligatory and start using it as
> reference source for team listings. We may also add a <url/>
> element for project pages, and possibly <type/> to make some people
> who want fancy names happy.
>
> All other stuff is pretty much there already -- maintainer
> listings, with possibility of specifying roles, ability to subteam
> via <maintainersof/>. We also have an official webpage listing them
> [1]. We may possibly want to teach Wiki to get project members
> from herds.xml, dev.gentoo.org to update aliases from there and we
> need to teach willikins to use e-mail addresses instead of (or
> aside to) names.
>
> The package metadata.xml is pretty much ready too. We just stop
> using the stupid redundant <herd/> element, and put every herd as
> <maintainer/>. And again, we teach willikins to check maintainer
> e-mail addresses for herds.xml matches when doing !meta -v.
>
> So how do you feel about this?
>
> [1]:https://www.gentoo.org/inside-gentoo/developers/herds.html
>

I was reading this thread looking for something very much like this.
I'm glad I didn't have to write it up! :P I'd rather it not be an
actual database, though. Simple text files are enough; easy for
someone to grep for their e-mail address and add it where
needed/wanted. For those who want to be added to an alias and aren't
devs, we could either direct them to e-mail a developer or come up
with a simple form that can subscribe/unsubscribe them from an alias.
But that could create needless automated git commits, so it could be
an issue.

I think it's a great idea. We just need a mechanism to consolidate the
disparate group types into a single group. They all serve the same
function: to tie a group of people to a Single Point of Contact to
make it easier to communicate. herds.xml and extant aliases do that
for us. Most of the work's already done; it just needs some tweaking.

No tech discussion's complete without a little bikeshedding, so I
think the groups should either be called 'devgroups' or 'projects',
since that's pretty much what they boil down to.

- -- 
Daniel Campbell - Gentoo Developer
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