Re: [gentoo-project] Re: Call for agenda items - Council meeting 2016-04-10

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Sun, Apr 3, 2016 at 4:32 PM, Ulrich Mueller <ulm@gentoo.org> wrote:
>>>>>> On Sun, 3 Apr 2016, Rich Freeman wrote:
>
>> What project (if any) is officially responsible for the creation or
>> non-creation of Changelogs in the rsync mirrors?  Do they have an
>> opinion on this matter?  Would they prefer that the Council make a
>> decision?
>
>> I bring this up because this seems like the sort of thing the
>> Council typically doesn't interfere with.
>
> This concerns the Portage tree as a whole, as it is seen by a large
> fraction of users. Therefore I think it is a global issue, which is
> genuine council territory. Also the council has discussed this topic
> previously, most recently in the 20141014 and 20151108 meetings.
>
> From the 20141014 meeting summary:
>
>    "do we need to continue to create new ChangeLog entries once we're
>    operating in git?"
>    No: blueness, creffett (proxy for ulm), dberkholz, dilfridge,
>    radhermit, rich0, williamh

Sure, but the whole point of our vote was to not create a requirement.
Per the previous Council decision there is no requirement for
Changelogs to be present, but there is also no prohibition on them
being present.

I'm not really advocating for changing this.

>
> Furthermore, quoting robbat2's message from March 2nd:
>
> | Either way, ~60% are in favour of getting rid of changelogs.
>
> | IMO this is a BETTER goal than continuing to generate them for
> | rsync, and bike-shedding about what the order should be; and it
> | provides a huge benefit by reducing the size of rsync by 155MiB.
>
> To me this sounds more like an open question than as a notice that
> infra is going to drop ChangeLogs. If the council thinks that such
> a decision is at infra's discretion then presumably we should make
> a statement to that effect.

That works fine for me, and was basically my intent.

>
>> Right now I'm personally inclined to vote against any resolution
>> requiring anybody to do anything simply because I don't see a
>> pressing need to impose a policy on them.  I'd encourage anybody who
>> wants a repo with different/absent Changelogs to just create one and
>> let others sync it as they desire.
>
> Presumably, this would imply duplicating the rsync mirror system?

Sure.  It has already been done once with git:
https://github.com/gentoo-mirror/gentoo.git

I don't see why others couldn't do the same if they wished.

In any case, I'm fine with leaving it completely up to infra.  I
consider Changelogs to be nice to have, and I'm not going to force
devs to maintain them.  I'm not sure how I could even force a dev to
maintain them if I wanted to.  At most I could volunteer to maintain
them myself, and I don't intend to do that.  However, if somebody else
wants to maintain them and feels there is a barrier standing in their
way I don't have a problem with removing that barrier if it is
reasonable to do so.

-- 
Rich