[gentoo-dev] Re: GLEP 42 (Critical news reporting) updates

[Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@cox.net>]

Jason Stubbs posted <200512120911.53976.jstubbs@gentoo.org>, excerpted
below,  on Mon, 12 Dec 2005 09:11:53 +0900:

> On Monday 12 December 2005 09:01, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
>> On Mon, 12 Dec 2005 08:44:00 +0900 Jason Stubbs <jstubbs@gentoo.org>
>>
>> wrote:
>> | Repositories will be user-labelled. However, all that readers need be
>> | concerned with is how to extract the repository name from the
>> | news.unread file and how to then resolve that to a directory name,
>> | regardless of how repositories are implemented.
>>
>> See, this is exactly why I'm not wanting to care about multiple repo
>> details at this point. There's no specification of how they work and
>> what exactly they're supposed to do, and to make matters worse the way
>> you seem to think they'll be handled is a really really bad way of
>> doing it.
> 
> Regardless of what you think about the current plans for multiple repository 
> support, the details that readers will need to know wont change.

Ciaran hasn't stated, but it appears to me if I'm reading correctly
between the lines, the reason he doesn't want to mess with specifying
multiple repo details right now is that it's getting the cart before the
horse in terms of nailing down certain areas of the multiple repo spec.

For example,  if repository-id forms a part of the path and we define path
parsing now, then we are effectively defining legal characters for
repository-id now. That's an entirely different glep, far out of scope and
reaching into other people's territory, limiting how that might be
implemented by defining a portion of the id-scope in an entirely unrelated
glep.

Given how heated I've seen GLEP discussion get (and I'm not saying that's
/bad/, just a fact), I really can't blame Ciaran for attempting to keep
the scope of the proposal, and therefore the debate, down to exactly what
he's aiming to accomplish, without ending up getting into an entirely
/different/ debate about how he's limiting the future flexibility of the
multiple repo implementation.  Once there's a concrete proposal there to
work with, then and only then, he's saying (from my viewpoint), is it
appropriate for consideration in relation to the news proposal.
Don't unnecessarily tie the two together, complicating life for both.  Let
each be argued on its merits separately, and when/if multiple repo is
actually close enough to deployment that there's some actual rules to work
with, /then/ worry about fixing this to match.

If I'm incorrect, just tell me to go back in my corner and lurk some more
<g>, but that's what I'm getting out of this subthread so far.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman in
http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/12/22/rms_interview.html


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