Re: Getting descriptions for cgit

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Fri, 2009-03-20 at 00:18 -0400, Owen Taylor wrote:
> One missing piece on git.gnome.org right now is to be able to set the
> descriptions for http://git.gnome.org/cgit/. The current method is
> "ask someone in the gitadmin group to do it for you", and they 
> 
>  echo "Next generation GNOME desktop shell"  > /git/gnome-shell.git/descripotion
> 
> Some ideas about how it could work:
> 
>  A) We could have another special command to set the description
> 
>      ssh git.gnome.org set-description gnome-shell "Next generation GNOME desktop shell"
> 
>     This is really trivial to implement, but means no version control, no logging
>     of who changed what to what, etc.
> 
>  B) We could use a DESCRIPTION file checked into the module and pull that
>     out in a hook.
> 
>     This clutters every project with another file containing almost nothing
> 
>  C) We could add a line to MAINTAINERS
> 
>       Description: Next generation GNOME desktop shell
> 
>     Sort of weird to have in maintainers. I also don't know what parses MAINTAINERS
>     and would have to be adapted.

Mango and Pulse read MAINTAINERS, as far as I know.  I'm
pretty sure both of them will just silently ignore a line
like this.

For Pulse, I'd love to actually get that information, so
having it in version control would be great.

>  D) We could revive the DOAP idea
> 
>     I thought it was a quite reasonable idea, but it generated a fair bit of  
>     hostility that I don't fully understand.
> 
>     Hmm, we could make:
> 
>      ssh git.gnome.org set-description gnome-shell "Next generation GNOME desktop shell"
> 
>     read your maintainers file, combine it with the provided description, generate
>     a skeleton DOAP file, check it into your module in the MASTER branch... Or 
>     slightly less crackrock, we could have
> 
>      ssh git.gnome.org generate-doap gnome-shell > gnome-shell.rdf
> 
>     And you have to edit the skeleton yourself and check it in. If we didn't require
>     people to write a <description/> then it would only be a few seconds per module,
>     and that mostly in coming up with a short description for your module. Filling
>     in your home page takes no time or thought.

I think people largely opposed the verbosity of RDF.  Plus,
there were concerns about redundant data, since a lot of
stuff you'd find in a DOAP file can be found elsewhere in
the module, if you know how to get it.

I wonder if we could define some sort of non-RDF project
info file format that people actually wouldn't mind using.
Something flexible and well-defined enough to provide more
information that could be picked up by Pulse, but still
plain-text enough that humans would write and read it.

--
Shaun