Re: [Savannah-hackers-public] cgit/gitweb - owner updates
Hello Karl and all, On Feb 25, 2015, at 18:01, Karl Berry k...@freefriends.org wrote: BTW, I just thought of one more point: if the purpose of the owner field is to provide a way for people to contact the maintainers, only bug-PKG (not bugs-PKG, by the way) would do, I think. Maintainers are not obligated to be on any help or discussion list by the GNU standards. Although it's true that in practice they almost(?) always are. Anyway, looking at your file, findutils should be bug-findutils rather than findutils-patches. I didn't see any other immediate discrepancies. I guess now it's a judgement call: use 'bug-PKG' for all gnu packages, or the more 'help-like' one if such list exists - which do you prefer? I'll update the file accordingly. Regarding findutils: interesting, on the website (and in the database) there's only 'findutils-patches': http://savannah.gnu.org/mail/?group=findutils - mysql select list_name from mail_group_list,groups where mail_group_list.group_id = groups.group_id and groups.unix_group_name = 'findutils'; +---+ | list_name | +---+ | findutils-patches | +---+ 1 row in set (0.02 sec) - Could be that someone created the mailing list manually long ago? This can probably be fixed with a careful 'INSERT' to the database. - Assaf
Re: [Savannah-hackers-public] cgit/gitweb - owner updates
BTW, I just thought of one more point: if the purpose of the owner field is to provide a way for people to contact the maintainers, only bug-PKG (not bugs-PKG, by the way) would do, I think. Maintainers are not obligated to be on any help or discussion list by the GNU standards. Although it's true that in practice they almost(?) always are. Anyway, looking at your file, findutils should be bug-findutils rather than findutils-patches. I didn't see any other immediate discrepancies. thanks, karl
Re: [Savannah-hackers-public] cgit/gitweb - owner updates
Hi Assaf, Though there are few existing cases of names being used for owners: If a person decides to put their own name in, that's up to them. My point was, we shouldn't do it automatically. emacs.git Jim+Meyering Certainly wrong, as Jim would be the first to say. Which makes me think this information doesn't actually matter. So why are we spending time on it at all? There are several packages (gnu included) which have other lists for more general discussions, and not for bugs. Yep, I am well aware of this. I spend my life dealing with gnu and nongnu (and tug) mailing lists. Not much of a life :). Would you think these are more suitable for initial contact, For initial contact, yes, a help list would be better. It all depends on what this owner information is for. But a couple of your proposed lists didn't seem good to me. I'll have to look at your list. I'll do that and get back to you as soon as I can. (Won't be today.) Meanwhile, the principal reason I proposed bug-PKG is because: what happens when a new package is approved, a git repository is created .. and the information is blank. You can't put a help list in because it's a new package. What are you going to do? Only bug-PKG should work (eventually). There's no way of knowing when, if ever, another list will be created. Personally, it seems much more useful to me (though much less fun, granted) to provide a UI so owners can update the info themselves than worrying about what value to automatically inflict on existing repositories. thanks, karl
[Savannah-hackers-public] cgit/gitweb - owner updates
Hello, similar to updating the git 'description' files, I plan to update the 'owner' information. Here I see two main options: 1. Use the name of the most veteran active administrator for each project. Few examples: administration Karl Berry (karl) adnsIan Jackson (ijackson) coreutils Jim Meyering (meyering) emacs Richard M. Stallman (rms) findutils Eric Blake (ericb) gawkArnold Robbins (arnold) sed Jose E. Marchesi (jemarch) tar Jeff Bailey (jbailey) This is similar to existing owner information in some projects, where the name is shown (but without contact information). 2. Use the email of the 'most suitable' mailing list. Few examples: administration savannah-help-pub...@gnu.org coreutils coreut...@gnu.org emacs help-gnu-em...@gnu.org findutils findutils-patc...@gnu.org gawkgawk-de...@gnu.org sed sed-de...@gnu.org tar help-...@gnu.org This is not as friendly as the name of the owner, but perhaps more useable. --- Since both of these lists were automatically generated based on the current database values, there's no easy perfect solution - there will always be exceptions or incorrect values. Which one do you think is better? The scripts and complete lists are available on fencepost:~agn/projects-owners/ - Assaf
Re: [Savannah-hackers-public] cgit/gitweb - owner updates
Which one do you think is better? A generic email address, definitely. Or else do nothing. It would be wrong to, e.g., call me the owner of administration, or rms the owner of Emacs or Jeff Bailey the owner of tar, so don't do that in any event. At least with generic email addresses, we're not specifying wrong information. Furthermore, I think I would suggest uniformly using bug-pkgn...@gnu.org. Per GNU standards, that address is always supposed to exist and be monitored for bug reports. (Although I know some packages do not do so, but that's a different problem.) There is no other per-package address like that. Also, that way the info could be automatically created. We don't want to create yet more places that maintainers are supposed to insert redundant information. Above is for gnu packages. For nongnu, I can't think of anything to be done. (Aside from the well-known todo of creating a UI so package admins can update the info themselves.) karl
