Re: Rethinking GnomeGoals

[Luis Menina <liberforce freeside fr>]

Le 21/08/2011 18:53, Djohn Heist a écrit :
> I redid the template file and made it into an matrix so all modules and
> goals share the same page. It is inspired by
> http://people.gnome.org/~fpeters/299.html
>
> you can have a look at it on https://live.gnome.org/DjohnHeist

I'm not sure this would be a good change. Several modules on the same 
page make the wiki page harder to edit. Which is why the template page 
exists: it serves as a basis for each new goal state.

Moreover what you're doing can't become a new template: you would need 
to merge the real state of things with your modified template each time 
you're adding or removing a goal, or add/remove a module. And merging 
wiki data would pretty much be a nightmare.

Currently, we're also able to keep the status of an old goal. But with 
your matrix, this means your file would grow forever. No, the matrix 
idea is not a good one here. Frederic Peters only did that on the page 
you cite because that page wasn't on the wiki, but was automatically 
generated. And this is what should be done, in fact.

Let me explain: almost all the data we want is on the bugzilla. Only 
little data is relevant on the wiki: only the stuff that would change 
often, like the guidelines to achieve the goal for example that are 
heavily modified before they are ready to become a real goal. But a 
goal's status should be extracted from bugzilla. This would be best done 
IMHO done by using a attaching a special bugzilla keyword to the bug to 
identify to which goal it belongs (using the goal's name to compare it 
to the bug's title would forbid us to rename goals). I don't know though 
if bugzilla supports something like "gnome-goal:CorrectDesktopFiles" as 
a valid bug keyword. Otherwise, "ggCorrectDesktopFiles" would make it.

Then you would need to perform a bugzilla request and generate 
on-the-fly the status of all the bugs that share that keyword. The only 
problem I see there is than if no bug has been open for a specific 
module, we can't know if the status of the bug for this module is "todo" 
or "not needed", unless we automatically open bugs against the modules 
and triage them afterwards. Automatically opening the bugs may be seen 
as pollution of the bugzilla database, but sometimes it's unclear if a 
goal applies to a specific module. So maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea.

By doing this you would be able to get a goal's status across all 
modules, automatically know if a patch has been posted.

And the modules list and the modulesets could be parsed from the 
official modulesets in jhbuild. That way you could even follow new 
modules as they are included in GNOME.

Doing this may require a good amount of programming, so if your initial 
aim was just to update the template file, then use the original template 
and update the names of modules and modulesets according to those of 
GNOME 3, but not in a matrix.

Hope this helps.
--
Luis