Hi guys, As some of you have noticed, I made a change recently in ekeyword that causes ekeyword to alphabetize the keywords. I've realized I should have brought it up for discussion before making the change to the program. On that note, I apologize for unilaterally making that change without consulting the developer body for opinions.
Here is the the fuzzy history of keywording in a nutshell. Please
bear in mind that these bullet points happened over a period of years.
- Daniel originally wanted them alphabetized.
- A few people, myself included, pointed out that there's some
valuable information available when keywords are always added to
the end rather than being alphabetized. In particular, the
concept of a "maintainer arch" is possible, in which the first
arch in the list is supposed to indicate general stability of
the ebuild, a leader for other arches to follow.
- Some people disagreed with the "maintainer arch" concept. They
felt that the arch teams do a better job of testing than some
maintainers, and there's no point waiting for a maintainer to
decide something is stable.
- Some developers recently mentioned to me that alphabetizing
would probably be fine. At this point I felt that the tree was
diluted enough that there was no point resisting, so I went
ahead and made the change silently.
- My action was questioned privately on IRC, and I realized
I made the decision without proper discussion. So I'm writing
this email.
Honestly, the arguments aren't very strong in either direction.
I think everybody understands this, but nonetheless people have their
preferences. Here are some of the basic arguments:
alpha
-----------------------------
- looks nicer (subjective)
- easier to tell at a glance if a given keyword is in the list
append
-----------------------------
- slightly less cvs/rsync traffic
- allows "maintainer arch" to continue until another solution is
produced, for those who still depend on that method
- some developers are accustomed to the "append" method and don't want
things to change, at least not without discussion
I am willing to revert the ekeyword change if that is what devs would
prefer, but I won't make the change without a discussion on -dev,
which was my mistake last time. Your thoughts?
If the thread isn't obviously unified one direction or the other,
I guess we'll eventually put this up to a developer or manager vote
(I'm not sure which is appropriate)
Regards,
Aron
--
Aron Griffis
Gentoo Linux Developer
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