> On Tue, 9 Sep 2014 21:45:49 +0200 > Michał Górny <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> Let's keep it short: I think herds don't serve any special purpose >> nowadays. Their existence is mostly resulting in lack of consistency >> and inconveniences. >>
Resurrecting this thread per the last council decision: "The council is in favor of retiring herds, allowing non-maintainer aliases to exist, and having a way to distinguish between individuals, projects, and non-maintainer aliases in metadata.xml. The details of how to implement this will be worked out in the lists before the next meeting." Whether this gets worked out before the next meeting remains to be seen. However, the council is certainly interested in proposals and discussion. So, herds are going to go away. That leaves maintainers (who can be projects), and aliases (who are NOT maintainers, but can be listed in addition to maintainers). My proposal: For the steady state: 1. For the maintainer tag in metadata, have a type attribute that can be developer, project, or proxy. 2. Add a contacts tag in metadata that takes an email. 3. Package without maintainers (individuals or projects - regardless of presence of aliases) get assigned to maintainer-needed and get treecleaned as usual. I'm also fine with normalizing this and just switching to a contact tag that can have a type of developer, project, proxy, or contact. That is a bigger change. However, it would probably simplify scripting and be a bit cleaner for the long-term. For the transition to the steady state: a. We generate a list of all current herds and email their aliases to see if they want to be converted to a non-maintainer alias, or be disbanded entirely. One reply to the email is enough to keep the alias around, no replies means retirement. b. Anybody in Gentoo can start a project already by following GLEP 39. It is encouraged for these projects to take over existing aliases where they feel it is appropriate. There is no need for all aliases to have a project - just ones that want some kind of structure (ie this is strictly voluntary). When this is done the project will remove the herd from metadata and add the project alias as a maintainer with the agreed-upon tagging. c. We generate a list of all current packages that do not have a maintainer (either one or more individuals or projects (NOT herds)). That gets posted so that individuals can claim them. I suggest not doing the usual treecleaning email since there could be a LOT of them. Or we could do it herd-by-herd over time to ease the load. d. We remove all herds from the existing packages. Where aliases were kept in (a) above they are converted to aliases with appropriate tagging. If no maintainer exists the package is handled per the result of (c). Comments, alternatives, etc? -- Rich
