Hello, Let's keep it short: I think herds don't serve any special purpose nowadays. Their existence is mostly resulting in lack of consistency and inconveniences.
In particular: 1. We have two different tags in metadata.xml that serve a similar purpose -- <herd/> and <maintainer/>, with <herd/> being less descriptive. For this reason, sometimes herd's associated e-mail is listed as <maintainer/>, and sometimes even the same thing is listed using both tags. 2. The common use of <herd/> and <maintainer/> thingies forces a particular maintainership model. In particular, we always assume <maintainer/> comes first, and <herd/> serves as a backup. You can't properly say otherwise using both tags. 3. The project member and herd member lists are constantly outdated. In fact, most of the herds don't even list members -- just point out to outdated project pages :). 4. The whole indirection is just irritating. You can't assign a bug using metadata.xml without fetching herds.xml that's in a different CVS repo. I believe it would be benfiicial to just deprecate and eventually drop <herd/> in favor of explicit <maintainer/> using the alias. I don't know if someone has other use of herds.xml but it the contents are either outdated or redundant. Therefore, I would suggest eventually getting rid of that file as well. What do you think? -- Best regards, Michał Górny
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