... or why just changing stuff is not enough: A few days ago I was told that http://euscan.gentooexperimental.org/herds/ was displaying an empty list. Which is annoying because people sometimes want to see what upstream updates are available for their herd.
Well, we renamed herd to project. Because reasons. I don't care how it is named, but this change broke euscan in a user-visible way. Now I could just try to rename things there too, but that won't work: euscan uses gentoolkit for parsing metadata.xml and herds.xml (Since herds.xml is basically unmaintained cruft at this point this will break soon anyway ... but ...) Changing gentoolkit to use projects.xml instead of herds.xml won't be a simple migration since the data organization changed. Now instead of looking up [metadata.xml] -> (herd name) -> [herds.xml] -> email it goes backwards: [metadata.xml] -> (maintainer type=project) -> email -> [projects.xml] -> Project name Since this involves XML and python's ElementTree library it's a nontrivial change that also removes a few now useless helpers (_get_herd_email has no reason to be, but we'd need a _get_herd_name helper instead. Err, get_proj ... ah well, whatever name works) And all that just so (1) gentoolkit output works and (2) euscan updates properly. Both of which I don't really care about much, but now that I've invested ~4h into debugging and trying to fix it I'm a tiny bit IRRITATED. Please, next time someone has the brilliant idea of changing stuff just to change it (I still don't see a reason why we had to change metadata.xml?), it should be required that support tools are fixed *before* the change, and working versions released. This avoids grumpy people and makes it harder for those that change things to head-in-sand and claim everything works as expected when it obviously doesn't. And this, again, supports my default phrase: "Change is not Progress", because now we have regressions and user-visible breakage, and it's hard to qualify how the change actually improved anything because we haven't actually *finished* the change. (Like the git migration that is still ongoing ...) Do the needfull! Be of excellent moral person!
