Eric Belanger wrote:
Shouldn't the first step be to identify clearly what current or potential problems are we trying to solve? Maybe that whole repo reorganisation is not needed after all.
Here are some I'm trying to solve: 1) Unclarity about what our committment is to packages in various repos. We need some clear way for the dev team to commit to maintaining a package in the long term, and some way to easily identify and track packages identified thusly. 2) Gross numbers of orphans everywhere and no clear method to follow to proceed to eliminate them on an ongoing basis. (not saying your proposal doesn't address this.. but you asked for the problem list) 3) Reducing the inefficiencies in the tools that developers and community members have at their disposal currently to contribute their stellar efforts for the benefit of everyone. Specifically: a) Moving packages from one repo to another is hard. b) Placing packages in multiple repos is hard. c) Continued separate-track development on a package while in testing is hard. d) Tracking multiple binary repos for different architectures is hard. e) Maintenance of a package by more than one person is hard. This is just a start. All of these goals can be served or affected by the choices we make for repo design.
If the main issue here is a potential increase in the number of orphans after the current cleanup, I posted a simple solution in another thread that would work with the current repo setup with zero work involved.
This is one of the main issues, yes.
BTW, we should wait until the cleqanup/adoption is completed before doing any repo work.
That might make sense, depending on whether or not this would help or get in the way of the cleanup/adoption effort. - P