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

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

[Marius Mauch]

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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.

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

[Marius Mauch]

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

> 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?

Hmm, apparently I confused people even more, so let me summarize my
proposal:
Basically I want to replace all <herd>foo</herd> tags in metadata.xml
with <maintainer><email>foo-alias@gentoo.org</email></maintainer>, 
just like ordinary maintainers are listed.
And instead of using a manually maintained herds.xml get list of team
members either directly from the mail alias definitions or
indirectly from some auto-generated (and eventually filtered)
plaintext file.

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.

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

[Ferris McCormick]

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On Thu, 22 May 2008 00:38:10 +0200
Marius Mauch <genone@gentoo.org> wrote:

> On Wed, 21 May 2008 23:42:19 +0200
> Marius Mauch <genone@gentoo.org> wrote:
> 
> > 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?
> 
> Hmm, apparently I confused people even more, so let me summarize my
> proposal:
> Basically I want to replace all <herd>foo</herd> tags in metadata.xml
> with <maintainer><email>foo-alias@gentoo.org</email></maintainer>, 
> just like ordinary maintainers are listed.
> And instead of using a manually maintained herds.xml get list of team
> members either directly from the mail alias definitions or
> indirectly from some auto-generated (and eventually filtered)
> plaintext file.
> 
> Marius
> 

I rather like it.  At least, that's the information I want from
metadata.xml.  I suppose you could keep the <herd>blah</herd> as well
if there is some reason to keep track of where the package fits in on
a finer scale than wherever it is in the tree, but for me a mail alias
for the maintainers is more useful. 
> -- 
> 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.

Regards,
Ferris
- -- 
Ferris McCormick (P44646, MI) <fmccor@gentoo.org>
Developer, Gentoo Linux (Sparc, Devrel, Userrel, Trustees)
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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.

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[gentoo-project] 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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