On Wed Nov 26 2014 at 7:27:20 AM Brad Jorsch (Anomie) bjorsch@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Tue, Nov 25, 2014 at 9:45 PM, James Forrester <jforrester@wikimedia.org
wrote:
and in particular the plan for what we'll call the existing repos < https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator/Diffusion/
Callsign_naming_conventions/Existing_repositories
I can't find documentation anywhere for what's valid in callsigns besides "uppercase", but seeing feature requests for stuff like "Allow digits in callsigns" and "allow hyphens in callsigns" I'm suspecting the character set is literally [A-Z]. Which means a lot of the callsigns you have on that page aren't even valid.
Gah, how did that slip through? I could've sworn...whatever, moving on.
Is the "repo name" column there supposed to be meaning "rename 'mediawiki/extensions/AbuseFilter' to just 'AbuseFilter'"? If that's the case, then IMO the proposed naming is simply awful. We have so many repositories that namespacing them is essential to make any sense out of things without already knowing what is what. For example, what's "Donate"? An extension for donations would be my guess. It's much clearer when it's called "mediawiki/skins/Donate", then you know it's actually a skin. And your own naming conventions page says that "Example" is a bad name, and yet you're proposing renaming "mediawiki/skins/Example" to "Example" and "mediawiki/extensions/Examples" to "Examples"!
Those are bad examples and should have better names. But repo names are just descriptive in Phabricator, they don't really matter beyond display (hence the callsigns for linking). They can have spaces too :)
They also don't affect cloning paths which is outside the scope of what we're discussing here.
I think forcing every repo to be called Foo/Bar/Baz is ugly and redundant for things that don't conflict. For things that do, just describe them better. Call it "Example Extension" or somesuch.
From the link to https://secure.phabricator.com/T4245 that was posted elsewhere in this thread, it looks like this whole idea of "callsigns" is a response to someone having a problem with resolving svn revision numbers on the level of single-digit numbers of repositories. It doesn't seem to me that it will scale AT ALL to the hundreds of repositories that we have, and we're extremely likely to be running into problems that are far more serious than the claimed problems from calling a repository "/core".
/core is a red herring and irrelevant to this discussion. Let's drop it.
If we can't -2 the whole idea of required callsigns, it seems to me we'd be better served by just treating them as random base-26 integers with no inherent meaning.
I'm not opposed to that. It would make my life so much easier.
-Chad