[gentoo-dev] Re: [gentoo-project] About herds and their non-existant use

[gentoo-dev] Re: [gentoo-project] About herds and their non-existant use

[Marius Mauch]

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Moving the discussion to -dev per leios request.

On Wed, 21 May 2008 23:42:19 +0200
Marius Mauch <genone@gentoo.org> wrote:

> As this topic jus came up in #-dev, and most people there seemed to
> agree with me I thought it might be worth to bring this topic up
> again. The topic is that I think that the whole 'herd' concept we're
> using is a huge mess and should be removed. Now before eveyone starts
> screaming, lets look at what this concept actually is, as many people
> are quite confused by it:
> 
> 1) a herd is a group of packages (not a group of people)
> 2) the herds.xml file is used to assign people and mail aliases as
> maintainers of a given herd. Unfortuntely the syntax there give
> the impression that those people/mail aliases actually form the herd
> 3) the <herd> tag in metadata.xml is used to assign a package to a
> certain group.
> 4) the <maintainer> tag in metadata.xml can be used to assign
> individual maintainers for a package in addition to/instead of the
> herd maintainers
> 5) the combination of 2), 3) and 4) is used to determine the
> maintainers of a given package
> 
> Now most people will be familiar with 5) to some degree, and that is
> actually the only valid use case for the herd concept that I'm aware
> of. Or has anyone some use case where you'd like to know what herd a
> package belongs to, but don't care about by whom that herd is
> maintained?
> If we can agree that this is the only real use case for the herd
> concept, then I think the concept is quite useless as it's just a
> redundant layer of indirection. You could just list mail aliases
> directly as maintainers, without having to consult herds.xml first.
> 
> This would have a number of benefits:
> - you no longer have to look at herds.xml to determine the actual
> maintainers of a given package (as herd-name and associated mail alias
> don't always match)
> - it would simplify bug assignment rules, as the current case where a
> package has both a <herd> and a <maintainer> tag in metadata.xml no
> longer exists
> - eliminate confusion about what a herd actually is
> - only have one location where members of a given team are listed,
> currently it's possible and quite likely that herds.xml and the mail
> alias files get out of sync
> - as others said in #-dev: it makes sense ;)
> 
> Now there of course are a few things to consider:
> - obviously, some tools, docs and processes would have to be updated,
> but that's always the case with changes
> - someone said that it might no longer be obvious if a package is
> maintained by an individual or a group of people. But is that really
> necessary? And it's not even obvious now, as some herds are maintained
> by a single person.
> - when I brought this up several months ago it was mentioned that
> sometimes people want to be on the mail alias of a herd, but don't
> want to be listed as members (and therefore be responsible). But that
> can likely be just implemented by some kind of blacklist in the
> relevant tools instead of using this whole indirection layer all the
> time.
> 
> So, what do you think? Is there some benefit in keeping this concept,
> or can we live without it and make life simpler for everyone?
> 
> Marius
> 
> -- 
> Public Key at http://www.genone.de/info/gpg-key.pub
> 
> In the beginning, there was nothing. And God said, 'Let there be
> Light.' And there was still nothing, but you could see a bit better.


-- 
Public Key at http://www.genone.de/info/gpg-key.pub

In the beginning, there was nothing. And God said, 'Let there be
Light.' And there was still nothing, but you could see a bit better.

[-- Attachment #2: signature.asc --]
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[gentoo-dev] Re: About herds and their non-existant use

[Tiziano Müller]

Marius Mauch wrote:

> Moving the discussion to -dev per leios request.
> 
> On Wed, 21 May 2008 23:42:19 +0200
> Marius Mauch <genone@gentoo.org> wrote:
> 
>> As this topic jus came up in #-dev, and most people there seemed to
>> agree with me I thought it might be worth to bring this topic up
>> again. The topic is that I think that the whole 'herd' concept we're
>> using is a huge mess and should be removed. Now before eveyone starts
>> screaming, lets look at what this concept actually is, as many people
>> are quite confused by it:
>> 
>> 1) a herd is a group of packages (not a group of people)
>> 2) the herds.xml file is used to assign people and mail aliases as
>> maintainers of a given herd. Unfortuntely the syntax there give
>> the impression that those people/mail aliases actually form the herd
>> 3) the <herd> tag in metadata.xml is used to assign a package to a
>> certain group.
>> 4) the <maintainer> tag in metadata.xml can be used to assign
>> individual maintainers for a package in addition to/instead of the
>> herd maintainers
>> 5) the combination of 2), 3) and 4) is used to determine the
>> maintainers of a given package
>> 
>> Now most people will be familiar with 5) to some degree, and that is
>> actually the only valid use case for the herd concept that I'm aware
>> of. Or has anyone some use case where you'd like to know what herd a
>> package belongs to, but don't care about by whom that herd is
>> maintained?
>> If we can agree that this is the only real use case for the herd
>> concept, then I think the concept is quite useless as it's just a
>> redundant layer of indirection. You could just list mail aliases
>> directly as maintainers, without having to consult herds.xml first.
While I think the herds concecpt is somewhat useless, I'd rather like to see
something like this instead:

<maintainer>
  <team>foobar</team>
</maintainer>

This makes it clear that it is a team instead of a person (where <name>
would have been used)

And the herds.xml isn't completely useless, but I'd rather name it teams.xml
and list the teams there. This way we can validated the team mentioned in
<team>...</team> against the list of available teams and make sure the
complete thing is valid (can be done in the current metadata.dtd or in a
future metadata.xsd).
(If we're gonna re-use the <email>...</email> element for the herd-alias, we
can never validate it. And I'm personally for the: "if something can be
automatically validated, it should be")

>> 
>> This would have a number of benefits:
>> - you no longer have to look at herds.xml to determine the actual
>> maintainers of a given package (as herd-name and associated mail alias
>> don't always match)
I don't consider this much of a problem. You just have to know xsl/xpath to
cope with this as generating the list of mail-aliases to assign this bug to
is a simple xsl-transformation...
When we use XML we can also use the right tools to handle them, can't we?

>> - it would simplify bug assignment rules, as the current case where a
>> package has both a <herd> and a <maintainer> tag in metadata.xml no
>> longer exists
It doesn't. You can still have more than one <maintainer> in there.
We'd have to introduce an attribute to mark the primary maintainer.

>> - eliminate confusion about what a herd actually is
++

>> - only have one location where members of a given team are listed,
>> currently it's possible and quite likely that herds.xml and the mail
>> alias files get out of sync
Well, we need one location where the name of the team is mapped to the
actual mail-alias. But I don't get what you're trying to say...


Cheers,
Tiziano


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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: About herds and their non-existant use

[Luis Francisco Araujo]

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Tiziano Müller wrote:
| Marius Mauch wrote:
|
|> Moving the discussion to -dev per leios request.
|>
|> On Wed, 21 May 2008 23:42:19 +0200
|> Marius Mauch <genone@gentoo.org> wrote:
|>
|>> As this topic jus came up in #-dev, and most people there seemed to
|>> agree with me I thought it might be worth to bring this topic up
|>> again. The topic is that I think that the whole 'herd' concept we're
|>> using is a huge mess and should be removed. Now before eveyone starts
|>> screaming, lets look at what this concept actually is, as many people
|>> are quite confused by it:
|>>
|>> 1) a herd is a group of packages (not a group of people)
|>> 2) the herds.xml file is used to assign people and mail aliases as
|>> maintainers of a given herd. Unfortuntely the syntax there give
|>> the impression that those people/mail aliases actually form the herd
|>> 3) the <herd> tag in metadata.xml is used to assign a package to a
|>> certain group.
|>> 4) the <maintainer> tag in metadata.xml can be used to assign
|>> individual maintainers for a package in addition to/instead of the
|>> herd maintainers
|>> 5) the combination of 2), 3) and 4) is used to determine the
|>> maintainers of a given package
|>>
|>> Now most people will be familiar with 5) to some degree, and that is
|>> actually the only valid use case for the herd concept that I'm aware
|>> of. Or has anyone some use case where you'd like to know what herd a
|>> package belongs to, but don't care about by whom that herd is
|>> maintained?
|>> If we can agree that this is the only real use case for the herd
|>> concept, then I think the concept is quite useless as it's just a
|>> redundant layer of indirection. You could just list mail aliases
|>> directly as maintainers, without having to consult herds.xml first.
| While I think the herds concecpt is somewhat useless, I'd rather like
to see
| something like this instead:
|
| <maintainer>
|   <team>foobar</team>
| </maintainer>
|
| This makes it clear that it is a team instead of a person (where <name>
| would have been used)
|
| And the herds.xml isn't completely useless, but I'd rather name it
teams.xml
| and list the teams there. This way we can validated the team mentioned in
| <team>...</team> against the list of available teams and make sure the
| complete thing is valid (can be done in the current metadata.dtd or in a
| future metadata.xsd).
| (If we're gonna re-use the <email>...</email> element for the
herd-alias, we
| can never validate it. And I'm personally for the: "if something can be
| automatically validated, it should be")
|

I am also for renaming or making clear that these are 'teams' instead f
'herds'[0].

Unless a team can maintain several herds, I find the term 'herd'
confusing and better understood as 'team' instead.

My 2 cents.

[0]http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/metastructure/herds/herds.xml


- --

Luis F. Araujo "araujo at gentoo.org"
Gentoo Linux

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[gentoo-dev] Re: About herds and their non-existant use

[Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò]

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Luis Francisco Araujo <araujo@gentoo.org> writes:

> Unless a team can maintain several herds, I find the term 'herd'
> confusing and better understood as 'team' instead.

+1 on this. I always thought that if almost every dev misuses the term
herd, it was because the term had to be changed, rather than the devs
corrected...


-- 
Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò
http://blog.flameeyes.eu/

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: About herds and their non-existant use

[Arun Raghavan]

On Thu, May 22, 2008 at 2:34 PM, Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò
<flameeyes@gmail.com> wrote:
> Luis Francisco Araujo <araujo@gentoo.org> writes:
>
>> Unless a team can maintain several herds, I find the term 'herd'
>> confusing and better understood as 'team' instead.
>
> +1 on this. I always thought that if almost every dev misuses the term
> herd, it was because the term had to be changed, rather than the devs
> corrected...

Till very recently, I too misunderstood the meaning of the term. I
think one problem is that the term really hasn't been defined anywhere
(at least I couldn't find a proper definition on [1]).

I really do like the herds terminology because it is unique and has
become a Gentoo-ism of sorts. It also is reminiscent of Larry, in some
sense (herds -> grazing -> moo -> cow -> larry). :)

[1] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/metastructure/herds/

Just my ${currency} 0.02,
-- 
Arun Raghavan
(http://nemesis.accosted.net)
v2sw5Chw4+5ln4pr6$OFck2ma4+9u8w3+1!m?l7+9GSCKi056
e6+9i4b8/9HTAen4+5g4/8APa2Xs8r1/2p5-8 hackerkey.com
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: About herds and their non-existant use

[Marijn Schouten (hkBst)]

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Tiziano � wrote:
| Marius Mauch wrote:
|>> - only have one location where members of a given team are listed,
|>> currently it's possible and quite likely that herds.xml and the mail
|>> alias files get out of sync
| Well, we need one location where the name of the team is mapped to the
| actual mail-alias. But I don't get what you're trying to say...

While we're changing things around, perhaps we can then also standardize the mail alias to
team@gentoo.org.
What Marius is saying though is that there are two files that handle people and their
herds. One XML for saying who is in a herd and one for each herd mail alias on woodpecker
with a list of developer email prefixes.

Marijn

- --
Marijn Schouten (hkBst), Gentoo Lisp project, Gentoo ML
<http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/lisp/>, #gentoo-{lisp,ml} on FreeNode
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: About herds and their non-existant use

[Tiziano Müller]

Marijn Schouten (hkBst) wrote:
> While we're changing things around, perhaps we can then also standardize
> the mail alias to team@gentoo.org.
> What Marius is saying though is that there are two files that handle
> people and their herds. One XML for saying who is in a herd and one for
> each herd mail alias on woodpecker with a list of developer email
> prefixes.

Which could be generated out of the XML file, right?


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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: About herds and their non-existant use

[Santiago M. Mola]

On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 10:39 AM, Tiziano Müller <dev-zero@gentoo.org> wrote:
> Marijn Schouten (hkBst) wrote:
>> While we're changing things around, perhaps we can then also standardize
>> the mail alias to team@gentoo.org.
>> What Marius is saying though is that there are two files that handle
>> people and their herds. One XML for saying who is in a herd and one for
>> each herd mail alias on woodpecker with a list of developer email
>> prefixes.
>
> Which could be generated out of the XML file, right?
>

It could, but it would be nice to preserve a method for allowing
lurkers on aliases.

Regards,
-- 
Santiago M. Mola
Jabber ID: cooldwind@gmail.com

[gentoo-dev] Re: Re: About herds and their non-existant use

[Tiziano Müller]

Santiago M. Mola wrote:

> On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 10:39 AM, Tiziano Müller <dev-zero@gentoo.org>
> wrote:
>> Marijn Schouten (hkBst) wrote:
>>> While we're changing things around, perhaps we can then also standardize
>>> the mail alias to team@gentoo.org.
>>> What Marius is saying though is that there are two files that handle
>>> people and their herds. One XML for saying who is in a herd and one for
>>> each herd mail alias on woodpecker with a list of developer email
>>> prefixes.
>>
>> Which could be generated out of the XML file, right?
>>
> 
> It could, but it would be nice to preserve a method for allowing
> lurkers on aliases.

I'm sure something like this should be possible:

### AUTOGENERATED PART, DO NOT EDIT ###
...
### AUTOGENERATED END ###

### Add additional aliases here:
...


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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: About herds and their non-existant use

[Marius Mauch]

On Thu, 22 May 2008 08:05:07 +0200
Tiziano Müller <dev-zero@gentoo.org> wrote:

> While I think the herds concecpt is somewhat useless, I'd rather like
> to see something like this instead:
> 
> <maintainer>
>   <team>foobar</team>
> </maintainer>
> 
> This makes it clear that it is a team instead of a person (where
> <name> would have been used)
> 
> And the herds.xml isn't completely useless, but I'd rather name it
> teams.xml and list the teams there. This way we can validated the
> team mentioned in <team>...</team> against the list of available
> teams and make sure the complete thing is valid (can be done in the
> current metadata.dtd or in a future metadata.xsd).
> (If we're gonna re-use the <email>...</email> element for the
> herd-alias, we can never validate it. And I'm personally for the: "if
> something can be automatically validated, it should be")

Hmm, in that case maybe it's be possible to use a similar system for
devs, e.g. 
<maintainer>
  <dev>genone</dev>
</maintainer>
and only use the <email> element for non-dev maintainers and upstream
contacts. Anyway, as long as we use the same tag to list both
individual and group maintainers it would be an improvement IMO.

> >> This would have a number of benefits:
> >> - you no longer have to look at herds.xml to determine the actual
> >> maintainers of a given package (as herd-name and associated mail
> >> alias don't always match)
> I don't consider this much of a problem. You just have to know
> xsl/xpath to cope with this as generating the list of mail-aliases to
> assign this bug to is a simple xsl-transformation...
> When we use XML we can also use the right tools to handle them, can't
> we?

My point is that it's an unneccessary extra step Sometimes you only
have the raw XML file. Anyway, that's maybe more of a policy problem,
we just need to enforce 'name == mail alias' (or would that be such a
horrible requirement?)

> >> - it would simplify bug assignment rules, as the current case
> >> where a package has both a <herd> and a <maintainer> tag in
> >> metadata.xml no longer exists
> It doesn't. You can still have more than one <maintainer> in there.
> We'd have to introduce an attribute to mark the primary maintainer.

Relying on the order of <maintainer> elements doesn't work because ...?
(Assign to first listed maintainer, CC others)

> >> - only have one location where members of a given team are listed,
> >> currently it's possible and quite likely that herds.xml and the
> >> mail alias files get out of sync
> Well, we need one location where the name of the team is mapped to the
> actual mail-alias. But I don't get what you're trying to say...

Why do you need to separate the name from the alias? Sure, sometimes
there are technical reasons why you can't use your preferred name as
mail alias (when it matches a system account), but then you can just
adjust your name a bit (e.g. adding some suffix).
Don't know if you're aware of this, but the separation of herd names
and aliases of the herd maintainers has always been something that
bug-wranglers complained about.
But my main issue is that currently we have multiple unconnected
locations where teams are defined, some more and some less important:
- herds.xml
- project pages
- mail aliases
- cvs access groups
- role definitions in ldap/roll-call
So when someone wants to change his roles there are a lot of places to
care about, and it's likely that one or more are forgotten and things
get out of sync, so you have different views of who actually belongs to
a group depending on what source you use. Don't know if it has improved
in the last years, but it used to happen quite often that herds.xml was
completely out of sync with reality simply because it didn't
really affect anything (now that jeeves is using it it's probably
become a bit better).
Ideally we could list that information in just one authorative
location, but that's not feasable for technical reasons, but if we can
eliminate one source (or auto-generate it from another source) the
problem is already reduced quite a bit. And herds.xml is IMO the most
likely candidates for that, but there are of course also other ways to
improve the situation.

Marius
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Re: About herds and their non-existant use

[Marius Mauch]

On Fri, 23 May 2008 14:07:41 +0200
Tiziano Müller <dev-zero@gentoo.org> wrote:

> Santiago M. Mola wrote:
> 
> > On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 10:39 AM, Tiziano Müller
> > <dev-zero@gentoo.org> wrote:
> >> Marijn Schouten (hkBst) wrote:
> >>> While we're changing things around, perhaps we can then also
> >>> standardize the mail alias to team@gentoo.org.
> >>> What Marius is saying though is that there are two files that
> >>> handle people and their herds. One XML for saying who is in a
> >>> herd and one for each herd mail alias on woodpecker with a list
> >>> of developer email prefixes.
> >>
> >> Which could be generated out of the XML file, right?
> >>
> > 
> > It could, but it would be nice to preserve a method for allowing
> > lurkers on aliases.
> 
> I'm sure something like this should be possible:
> 
> ### AUTOGENERATED PART, DO NOT EDIT ###
> ...
> ### AUTOGENERATED END ###
> 
> ### Add additional aliases here:
> ...

When you want to generate mail aliases from an XML file I'm quite sure
you could list lurkers in the XML file by tagging them somehow
(attribute or different element name). The main thing is to have one
authorative location.

Marius
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: About herds and their non-existant use

[Robin H. Johnson]

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On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 07:18:16AM +0200, Marijn Schouten (hkBst) wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> Tiziano ??? wrote:
> | Marius Mauch wrote:
> |>> - only have one location where members of a given team are listed,
> |>> currently it's possible and quite likely that herds.xml and the mail
> |>> alias files get out of sync
> | Well, we need one location where the name of the team is mapped to the
> | actual mail-alias. But I don't get what you're trying to say...
>
> While we're changing things around, perhaps we can then also standardize 
> the mail alias to team@gentoo.org.
The sole reason that isn't possible is that some teams would have names
that conflict with system accounts. While it's possible to override
those in the Gentoo mail server setup, the system account versions DO
receive a _LOT_ of spam because they are so common (eg mysql@, ldap@).

-- 
Robin Hugh Johnson
Gentoo Linux Developer & Infra Guy
E-Mail     : robbat2@gentoo.org
GnuPG FP   : 11AC BA4F 4778 E3F6 E4ED  F38E B27B 944E 3488 4E85

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[gentoo-dev] Re: About herds and their non-existant use

[Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò]

"Robin H. Johnson" <robbat2@gentoo.org> writes:

> The sole reason that isn't possible is that some teams would have names
> that conflict with system accounts. While it's possible to override
> those in the Gentoo mail server setup, the system account versions DO
> receive a _LOT_ of spam because they are so common (eg mysql@, ldap@).

What about standardising on a suffix too?

video-team@g.o or video-maintainers@g.o or video-devs@g.o

and then all the aliases following that

video-$suffix@g.o sound-$suffix@g.o and so on

-- 
Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò
http://blog.flameeyes.eu/

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: About herds and their non-existant use

[Rémi Cardona]

Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò a écrit :
> "Robin H. Johnson" <robbat2@gentoo.org> writes:
> 
>> The sole reason that isn't possible is that some teams would have names
>> that conflict with system accounts. While it's possible to override
>> those in the Gentoo mail server setup, the system account versions DO
>> receive a _LOT_ of spam because they are so common (eg mysql@, ldap@).
> 
> What about standardising on a suffix too?
> 
> video-team@g.o or video-maintainers@g.o or video-devs@g.o
> 
> and then all the aliases following that
> 
> video-$suffix@g.o sound-$suffix@g.o and so on
> 

or $team@herds.gentoo.org ?

Rémi
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[gentoo-dev] Re: Re: About herds and their non-existant use

[Tiziano Müller]

Marius Mauch wrote:
> Hmm, in that case maybe it's be possible to use a similar system for
> devs, e.g.
> <maintainer>
>   <dev>genone</dev>
> </maintainer>
> and only use the <email> element for non-dev maintainers and upstream
> contacts. Anyway, as long as we use the same tag to list both
> individual and group maintainers it would be an improvement IMO.

Sure, that'd be great. This information could be autogenerated from LDAP
though.

This would result in something like this:

<pkgmetadata>
<xi:include href="http://www.gentoo.org/metadata/metadata-refs.xml"
xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude"/>
<!-- ^^ depends on how we decide to implement things -->
<maintainer>
  <herd>foobar</herd>
</maintainer>
<maintainer primary="true">
  <dev>moomooman</dev>
</maintainer>
<maintainer>
  <email>foobar@somewhere.com</email>
  <name>Someone Foobar</name>
  <description>Proxy maintainer</description>
</maintainer>


Just in case someone's interested: http://dev.gentoo.org/~dev-zero/metadata/
There is a first metadata.xsd and a couple of metadata.xml files for
testing.

You can validate using this: 'xmllint --xinclude --schema
metadata.xsd --noout $FILE' since xmllint seems to ignore the XSD
specification in the XML and tries to validate against a non-existing DTD.

The metadata.xsd is a work-in-progress and not finished (yet).

Cheers,
Tiziano


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[gentoo-dev] Re: Re: About herds and their non-existant use

[Tiziano Müller]

Marius Mauch wrote:
> have the raw XML file. Anyway, that's maybe more of a policy problem,
> we just need to enforce 'name == mail alias' (or would that be such a
> horrible requirement?)
Ahem, yes.

Consider these examples:
1) pgsql@gentoo.org
2) pgsql-bugs@gentoo.org
3) a.dev@gentoo.org
4) a.nonexisting.dev@gentoo.org
5) moon@cow.com
6) pgsql-bugs@genoo.org

1) should validate to false because the alias actually is
pgsql-bugs@gentoo.org. Can be validated against herds.xml
2) should validate to true. Can be validated against herds.xml
3) should validate to true. Needs validation against LDAP.
4) should validate to false. Needs validation against LDAP.
5) can't be validated and is therefore always true.
6) can't be validated and is therefore always true (but is in fact a typo)

Now you can say: ok, if we have "@gentoo.org" in it, we go through all the
cases and in case we don't find it in the LDAP or in herds.xml, it is a
faulty entry. 
But that requires some more scripts and more time to parse than a
single "xmllint"-run.

Now: When we introduce a <team> (and maybe a <dev>) element in <maintainer>,
we exactly know, what it should be.
What the content of such elements should match (whether <name> or <email> in
herds.xml) is another question (where I tend to say it should be <name>
such that aliases can be changed in case of spam-issues, etc.).

> 
>> >> - it would simplify bug assignment rules, as the current case
>> >> where a package has both a <herd> and a <maintainer> tag in
>> >> metadata.xml no longer exists
>> It doesn't. You can still have more than one <maintainer> in there.
>> We'd have to introduce an attribute to mark the primary maintainer.
> 
> Relying on the order of <maintainer> elements doesn't work because ...?
XML 1.0 specification doesn't define an order and parsers can therefore
ignore it (using the data to auto-assign bugs can then be unreliable).

> (Assign to first listed maintainer, CC others)
> 
>> >> - only have one location where members of a given team are listed,
>> >> currently it's possible and quite likely that herds.xml and the
>> >> mail alias files get out of sync
>> Well, we need one location where the name of the team is mapped to the
>> actual mail-alias. But I don't get what you're trying to say...
> 
> Why do you need to separate the name from the alias? Sure, sometimes
> there are technical reasons why you can't use your preferred name as
> mail alias (when it matches a system account), but then you can just
> adjust your name a bit (e.g. adding some suffix).
Changing your name because of technical difficulties? This is really not the
way to go. Systems have to be adjusted to meet our needs, not the other way
round (in case it is possible of course).
But nevertheless, it would be nice to have a common scheme as pointed out by
Flameeyes/Remi.

And I really, really, want to be able to create the project "gentoo@home" to
develop a client users can install to help us compile... ;-)

> Don't know if you're aware of this, but the separation of herd names
> and aliases of the herd maintainers has always been something that
> bug-wranglers complained about.
Because it isn't possible to auto-assign bugs and because they weren't aware
that with a short script it is possible to resolve herd-names to
mail-aliases (well, probably they are but it slows down the workflow).

> But my main issue is that currently we have multiple unconnected
> locations where teams are defined, some more and some less important:
> - herds.xml
> - project pages
> - mail aliases
> - cvs access groups
> - role definitions in ldap/roll-call
> So when someone wants to change his roles there are a lot of places to
> care about, and it's likely that one or more are forgotten and things
> get out of sync, so you have different views of who actually belongs to
> a group depending on what source you use. Don't know if it has improved
> in the last years, but it used to happen quite often that herds.xml was
> completely out of sync with reality simply because it didn't
> really affect anything (now that jeeves is using it it's probably
> become a bit better).
> Ideally we could list that information in just one authorative
> location, but that's not feasable for technical reasons, but if we can
> eliminate one source (or auto-generate it from another source) the
> problem is already reduced quite a bit. And herds.xml is IMO the most
> likely candidates for that, but there are of course also other ways to
> improve the situation.
The most likely candidate to be autogenerated or the most likely candidate
to autogenerate other information?

Well, as pointed out: it would be possible add a new element to <herd>
named "<watcher>" (or alike) which indicates a Dev not being part of the
team but wants to be added to the mail-alias. But then we really should
rename "herd" to "team". The role-information is already in the herds.xml
so referencing the team-name from a project site should be enough to
generate the needed information (maybe extend the role-element by an
element to allow this: <role>Developer/Security Liaison
<description>emacs</description></role>).

And why do we reference the project-url in <maintainingproject> and not just
the name of the project?

Cheers,
Tiziano


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[gentoo-dev] Re: About herds and their non-existant use

[Ulrich Mueller]

>>>>> On Sat, 24 May 2008, Tiziano Müller wrote:

> Changing your name because of technical difficulties? This is really
> not the way to go. Systems have to be adjusted to meet our needs,
> not the other way round (in case it is possible of course).

+1

> But nevertheless, it would be nice to have a common scheme as
> pointed out by Flameeyes/Remi.

But then it should be $HERD@gentoo.org rather than
$HERD-$SUFFIX@gentoo.org, because the former is the most common case
now (followed by $HERD-bugs@gentoo.org).

It would be quite pointless to change most teams' e-mail addresses in
our documentation.

Ulrich
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[gentoo-dev] Re: About herds and their non-existant use

[Tiziano Müller]

Ulrich Mueller wrote:

>>>>>> On Sat, 24 May 2008, Tiziano Müller wrote:
> 
>> Changing your name because of technical difficulties? This is really
>> not the way to go. Systems have to be adjusted to meet our needs,
>> not the other way round (in case it is possible of course).
> 
> +1
> 
>> But nevertheless, it would be nice to have a common scheme as
>> pointed out by Flameeyes/Remi.
> 
> But then it should be $HERD@gentoo.org rather than
> $HERD-$SUFFIX@gentoo.org, because the former is the most common case
> now (followed by $HERD-bugs@gentoo.org).
Which seems not to be possible because:
a) name clashes with system-accounts
b) common names are being spammed

> 
> It would be quite pointless to change most teams' e-mail addresses in
> our documentation.
That's why we should be able to use something like
<team-alias>$TEAM</team-alias> which gets replaced by the proper mail-alias
in the XSL (and yes, we could then also inject something obfuscated instead
of the real email-alias :-)

Cheers,
Tiziano


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