On 17/07/2023 19.37, Sam James wrote:
> 
> Big fan of the idea & very much in support of it. This also serves
> to give us logical groupings of packages which are closely related
> and should be bumped together.
> 
>> There was some brief discussion on IRC about how to document these
>> groupings, and two main ideas were suggested:
>>
>> - add a field to metadata.xml to specify the group by an arbitrary name.
>>   E.g. <stable-group name="..."/>
>>   Each package in the group would specify the same value of name="..."
>>
>> - maintain the groups in a separate place (similar to portage @sets).
>>
>> Can anyone think of particular advantages or disadvantages to one
>> solution versus the other? Any other (better) ideas?
>>
> 
> When we discussed this a few months ago on IRC, I also brought up a
> related point:
> 
> [2023-05-02T18:38:51+0100] <@sam_> do we want to repeat the group members in each member, or do tools need to scan for each thing?
> [2023-05-02T18:39:07+0100] <@sam_> i.e. does each member have <stable-group><pkg>...</pkg></stable-group>, or do we do <stable-group name=".../>?
> [2023-05-02T18:39:26+0100] <@arthurzam> I think each package says which groups it is part of
> [2023-05-02T18:39:44+0100] <@radhermit> I would do the latter
> [...]
> [2023-05-02T18:42:42+0100] <@radhermit> technically you could also maintain them in a separate place like metadata/groups and layer inter-group dependencies on top of that somehow in the format

If you read carefully my messages in IRC linked above, you can see I was
supporting per package metadata entry. If you read my latest post to ML,
you can see I now prefer central files. After many considerations since
then I understood my initial preference was a bad idea :)

(I'm noting it here just so folks understand the mismatch between texts
and my stance).

> I'd prefer the metadata/ at repo root idea because I can see updating
> various metadata.xmls being a nuisance.

Hmm, I was thinking the opposite (maintaining it in parallel place to
the package would be harder), but if you say so (and you help maintain
huge clusters of packages so I believe you) then I think we don't have
any good reason to go with per package metadata.xml entry?

Let's wait for more input, and then we can go with defining the syntax,
rules and such...

> best,
> sam
> 

-- 
Arthur Zamarin
arthurzam@gentoo.org
Gentoo Linux developer (Python, pkgcore stack, Arch Teams, GURU)