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List:       gentoo-desktop
Subject:    Re: [gentoo-desktop] The GNOME Herd Split
From:       Grant Goodyear <g2boojum () gentoo ! org>
Date:       2004-07-21 13:53:34
Message-ID: 20040721135334.GA694 () violet ! grantgoodyear ! org
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Mike Gardiner wrote: [Tue Jul 20 2004, 11:14:32PM EDT]
> This brings me to a point I raised a few months earlier, that I believe
> packages should be 'functionally herded', that is, herded by their
> function, rather than the toolkit implementation they use. For example
> (yes, I'm aware I originally added this package), the sussen program is
> a network monitoring application, loosely based on the nessus tools.
> This program is completely unrelated to GNOME - except for the tenuous
> link through the same windowing toolkits. It really belongs in netmon,
> but that's only the beginning of things...

I agree with the idea of "functional herding" for the most part, but I
do have some concerns.  One concern is that when it comes to a
particular function (say, CD burning software), the KDE software and the
GNOME software are probably built in very different ways.  Thus, the
folks maintaining this software now need to understand how a variety of
different eclasses work, many of which lack man pages.  It would be very
helpful if people who work w/ various eclasses would pick a "canonical"
ebuild that represents how to use that eclass particularly well, so that
we could compile a useful set of examples for new (and old!) devs to
look at.  (Ideally, the canonical example would be referenced in the
eclass man page.)  My other concern is that I hope we can agree that
sometimes functional herding is _not_ a panacea.  Right now we have a
net-mail herd that is far too broad.  It would be tempting to create a
mail-mta herd to handle all of the various mta's, but the odds are
pretty good that the person handling exim is unlikely to be a sufficient
qmail expert to handle problems that arise there, so the herd would be
shepherded by a fairly disjoint group of people.  I don't have a good
solution for this problem, so I'm just tossing it out for comments.

Best,
g2boojum
-- 
Grant Goodyear	
Gentoo Developer
g2boojum@gentoo.org
http://www.gentoo.org/~g2boojum
GPG Fingerprint: D706 9802 1663 DEF5 81B0  9573 A6DC 7152 E0F6 5B76

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