Re: Requiring DOAP instead of MAINTAINERS file

["Tristan Van Berkom" <tvb gnome org>]

On Jan 18, 2008 2:42 PM, Patryk Zawadzki <patrys pld-linux org> wrote:

On Jan 18, 2008 5:21 PM, Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com> wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-01-18 at 13:17 +0100, Patryk Zawadzki wrote:
> > 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.
> That's a nice idea. But it's easier for our developers to enter
> information into a file in svn than into a RDBMS. Even if there was a
> wonderful web interface, having it in svn makes it more likely that each
> svn module has up-to-date information. These are our habits and it's
> hard to change them.

Then use some easier to edit format (I don't really know, yaml?) and
do the parsing and generating behind the scenes. Kind of like GNOME
library works on its own, you just keep releasing. While DOAP is
certainly useful for computers, writing it by hand is as intuitive as
calling XMLRPC services using wget :)

I can see that xml might be a little less beautiful to the eye, and also
that text files might be a little less beautiful to a machine who has
to parse some custom format that might be subject to change, the great
thing about xml is that is very easy to read for a computer and
for a human. 

If computers have to read it to make our lives easier then I am all
for it (mostly because of Paulo's comment about updating webpages
automagically)

Also agree with Murray that having a sophisticated centralized database 
would confuse and complicate things in gnome, it's somehow reassuring to
me that every project has all of its important information in its separate
tarballs and revision history.

Cheers,
                -Tristan