Re: Requiring DOAP instead of MAINTAINERS file

["Olav Vitters" <ovitters gmail com>]

Responding to myself as this email address isn't subscribed to d-d-l
and so I don't have the response.

In response to Patryk Zawadzki:
> On Jan 18, 2008 1:08 PM, Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com> wrote:
> >
> > On Fri, 2008-01-18 at 12:04 +0100, Patryk Zawadzki wrote:
> > > What are the real benefits of DOAP (sounds like "dope," nice)? If it's
> > > meant for machines to query against then a database would be more
> > > useful.
> > this would be a database. DOAP is a just a human/machine readable
> > storage for data, which gets parsed and used as the source for
> > generating other stuff, like project pages and checks like Olav
> > proposed.
>
> I mean proper RDBMS. Once you get that in place you can generate
> DOAP/RDF/XML/whatever on the fly with little to no effort.

What is the benefit? I can only think about drawbacks:
* Need to write a frontend to allow people to edit it
* Somehow need to authenticate people so they can edit it (not sure
how you'd hookup a RDBMS nicely to SSH keys)
* Need to export to doap anyway
* Not all our services (machines) would be able to access the RDBMS
anyway as they aren't linked directly.
* Need to add a version control management in the RDBMS
* Need to add some kind of .po system to it for the translators
* I don't see what benefit all this complexity would have

> > > > if I'd say something about DOAP is that sometimes is overly verbose; but
> > > > it's quite descriptive and easy to parse/write, even by humans. most of
> > > > this data is not even meant to be changed often: the only sections that
> > > > changes regularly is the releases one - and that would be automagically
> > > > updated by the install-module script if I understood Olav's mail
> > > > correctly.
> > > Again, what is the use case for DOAP inside GNOME?
> > have you read the email Olav sent?
>
> Yes, see above. I clearly see the need of a better solution to
> MAINTAINERS problem but I think DOAP is parallel to that. It could be
> useful to deliver information outside but I believe GNOME would
> benefit from something else more on the inside.

As a gnome sysadmin there are various things I'd use this for aside
from what I mentioned. I don't understand the 'on the inside' remark.
Everyone is free to join GNOME. There is no 'inside' (apart from
simple things like getting SVN). The purpose is of course for the
GNOME infrastructure. I'm not proposing this because 'doap' is sexy or
something.

Regards,
Olav