Re: [gentoo-project] Call for Agenda Items -- Council Meeting 2015-10-11

["Michał Górny" <mgorny@gentoo.org>]

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Dnia 2015-09-30, o godz. 16:01:16
"Andreas K. Huettel" <dilfridge@gentoo.org> napisał(a):

> the Gentoo Council will meet again on Sunday, October 11 at 19:00 UTC in
> #gentoo-council on freenode.
> 
> Please reply to this message with any items you would like us to discuss
> or vote on.

I would like to get a final decision/vote on what to do about projects,
herds, etc. and the relevant metadata.

This has been discussed multiple times (at least [1] and [2] recently)
with no consensus so far. What's even worse, this has resulted in some
developers refusing sane changes [3] just because there's no official
consensus on 'the greater scheme'. The lack of any action results
in bugs piling up:

a. we still have no official way of figuring out whose approval is
meaningful regarding packages (project on wiki? herds.xml?).

b. Herd->project delegation became broken along with Wiki migration.
Mike has recently worked around this by copying project members from
wiki verbatim [4]. Sadly, this means we're back to having project &
herd members mis-synced.

c. Nobody has done anything about bug assignment -- we still have to
figure out what e-mail does the herd use.

d. Even then, different projects are using different rules for filling
metadata.xml.


In particular, I'd like to push the scheme proposed by myself at [5].
Long story short:

1. We keep herds.xml and bless it the official source of project/herd
metadata. Which means reusing the reusable format and keeping backwards
compatibility with most of the software out there.

1a. We stop the pointless, meaningless and frustrating bikesheds about
by what name we call them. Projects, herds, teams -- let's make them
all synonyms and finally be done with it because I'm really tired of
technical threads being hijacked on naming bikesheds.

1b. The project listings on Wiki become non-binding. In the future, we
may update them automatically from herds.xml but that's not a priority.

1c. We may also automatically add members to mail aliases from
herds.xml if someone really wants that. But again, not a priority.

1d. So, the official rule becomes: if you want to contact developers
who are maintainers of the package, use !herd. If you want to contact
all people interested in its issues, use !expn.

2. We deprecate <herd/> in metadata.xml and assign herds/teams/projects
via e-mail addresses. This keeps partial backwards compatibility with
existing tools and solves the bug assignment issue.

2a. If someone really cares about this, we add an extra attribute or
element which indicates the 'kind' of <maintainer/>. Otherwise, we just
match herds.xml by e-mail address.

This idea has seen no negative replies. I'm willing to do the necessary
work to get it working, in particular updating herds.xml
and metadata.xml using the script I prepared one year ago. I can also
update willikins.

[1]:https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/message/526a5be120b3a14096ede7eef8431fde
[2]:https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/message/44ef7ed7c2d9d29c23078d25d84b202b
[3]:https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/message/47786e3c78c83c3c557be8224fb56ad3
[4]:https://gitweb.gentoo.org/data/api.git/commit/?id=1377b7c3cf74dcae4b8390529c9577088c17e1a9
[5]:https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/message/cba0bfb7e2de780d4ac78f2e6fa9f19b

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny
<http://dev.gentoo.org/~mgorny/>

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