Advantages:
- {{package}} template can link to this as well as the page on
packages.gentoo.org when it exists
- packages.gentoo.org can link to this when it exists
- Serves as a good default place for "maintainer down" and
inter-maintainer documentation.
- Good place to document the sorts of things that don't make sense to
rely entirely on einfo and friends, or comments, to document
- Very easy to have automated functions in ebuilds for deriving a
relevant link to point people to, eg:
einfo "See $(package-wiki Testing) for details on comprehensive
testing"
Which would internally ingest ${CATEGORY}/${PN} and generate the full
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Package:${CATEGORY}/${PN}#Testing link
I'm already employing a strategy similar to this for Perl stuff, but
stuffing it all in Project:Perl/maint-notes/ has a lot of downsides (
which I'll describe later ), and it makes more sense for each node here
to be in a top level heirarchy, only grouped as being "perl related"
via [[Category]] controls.
I believe its also possible that if the right section names and details
are used, a general purpose search with SMW #ask can be made that does:
- List all packges in Package: which
1. Have [[Category:Perl Packages]]
2. Have the heading "Testing"
And therein, generate a list of pages which are perl related and have
specific instructions for testers.
Even general purpose pages which testers could skim through could be
made that lists all packages in tree with special testing instructions,
so when doing testing, one just rips open that list and ^F for the
package in question and seeing if there's anything matching.
The hard thing, but also a desirable thing, would be to have some way
for such pages to automatically have SMW-usable tags extracted from
metadata.xml, so that all pages for packages maintained by a given
maintainer can be trivially listed.
NB: I can't do this myself as it requires patching the source code to
add the new namespace.
Some of the present downsides of my approach:
- Category listings are inherently based on the full path relative to
the namespace, so they all index as "Perl/maint-notes/CAT/PN", which
is terrible for category listings.
- You can hack around this by specifying a "sort key" in your
[[Category]] statement, eg: [[Category:Foo|Bar]] in
Project:Perl/maint-notes/Bar
... But SMW searches with #ask seem to have no way to make use of this
information, and you go back to every result being grouped as "P... "
And the category pages themselves still list the individual *entries*
with the name in their namespace-relative path, so even if you use the
sort-key trick, the output itself is still filled with vast amounts of
redundancy.
Please Gentoo gods, let me have this thing.
I would propose at this point such pages should be gentoo-author
editable only, as they're intended to have the similar authority as
Project: and friends, and they're not intended to have the same scope
as the more general purpose top level pages that are more aimed at
general users, instead, these pages are more "internal", to solve the
sorts of problems that aren't suitable for stashing away on bugzilla.
Only sticky point would be getting edit perms for proxy-maintainers to
document their things.
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