On Mon, 29 Sep 2014 18:42:40 +0200 Jeroen Roovers <j...@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On IRC we seem to have found some consensus about metadata.xml: IRC is huge; where did you manage to find consensus in there with whom? > 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). This loses information that denotes it to be a herd, not a maintainer. > 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. This loses the lack of ordering, requiring unnecessary attention to it. > 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. This is nice to have, as automatic assignments reveal; but this makes it harder for a herd to change its e-mail address, which happens sometimes. > 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. We might not need a conversion; it also changes/requires another tool. > 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. That important ontological discussion is related as it is the origin, the proposal changes a fundamental file of the Gentoo Herds Project[1]; by doing so, you make changes in the meaning of a herd and its context. Reading further, we interestingly see that per the project page[1] 1) the metadata in metadata.xml must have a <herd> tag present, 2) a herd in herds.xml is not required to have an e-mail address; where the latter (2) is even confirmed by the herds.xml DTD[2]. [1]: http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/metastructure/herds/ [2]: http://www.gentoo.org/dtd/herds.dtd
