Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: Deprecating and killing the concept of herds

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Wed, Sep 24, 2014 at 12:31 PM, W. Trevor King <wking@tremily.us> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 10, 2014 at 04:18:40PM +0200, Michał Górny wrote:
>>
>> 4. A mail alias that is not project :). For example, we have clang@ for
>> easily aggregating all clang-related build failures and other bugs but
>> it isn't a formal team.
>
> As an incremental solution, what about a <watcher> tag in metadata.xml
> with the same format as <maintainer> except that being a watcher
> doesn't imply a willingness to *do* anything about a project, it just
> means you want to be notified of changes and added to the CC list.

I'd given some thought to this as well, but didn't think it was a good idea.

First, you can already create queries in bugzilla.

Second, if we wanted something more robust than being interested in a
package isn't something that is limited to devs.  If you're just going
to look at bugs but not do anything about them, then you are really
just a user who might happen to also have commit access.  Do we really
need to have a developer-only way of getting bug CC's for people who
don't actually want to fix the bugs?  Or, would it make more sense to
find a way for anybody to follow issues in packages, assuming bugzilla
queries aren't enough?

Now, if something like clang@ isn't a formal team but does consist of
people who are actually doing something, why not just make it a
project?  After all, a group of people interested in actually doing
something basically is the definition of a project.  Being a project
isn't some kind of huge commitment. and I think it makes sense to just
have devs and groups of devs instead of having 12 different kinds of
groups of devs and we can't keep straight which kinds of groups do (or
more typically don't do) what.

--
Rich