[Test-Announce] naming schemes

[Adam Williamson]

On Tue, 2014-09-16 at 08:42 -0400, Kamil Paral wrote:
> > > If I knew why someone thought 21_Alpha_TC6 was better than F21a-TC1 and
> > > 21-Alpha-TC3 I could do better. I never put underscores or whitespace in
> > > filenames or directory names. Names of downloads that do either get trashed
> > > or renamed. What's wrong with 21AlphaTC6, kdeRuntimeLibs or
> > > googleDroidSansMonoFonts, all of which can be pronouced without a bazillion
> > > extra syllables? Un-der-score, multiply? Why does anyone do that? Can
> > > anyone
> > > type an underscore without looking at the keyboard? Underscores for most
> > > purposes (not all), are _booby_traps_ (only after clicking send will I know
> > > if they produced the result I want).
> > 
> > To separate the individual elements, so you can parse the string
> > reliably. In the string 21AlphaTC6 how do I know where the release
> > number stops and the milestone starts and the milestone stops and the
> > compose type starts, without a lot of hardcoded special sauce knowledge
> > in the parser? The function of the - and/or _ are to act as separators
> > to make parsing the string easier and more reliable.
> 
> If the intent is to make the compose dir machine-processable

Not really. At least, it wasn't *my* intent. I literally wrote the
policy by looking at a gedit window containing every filename in the
Alpha TC1 compose and thinking 'what would be a scheme that'd be
consistent across all of these?' I was looking at filenames and just
trying to come up with a consistent scheme, because the mishmash we had
was getting unmanageable. I wasn't considering the directory structure
at all. Remember the naming scheme applies to official pre-releases
(Alpha, Beta) and the final release as well, which don't live in the
stage/ structure, obviously - it's a general naming scheme for Fedora
deliverables, it's not specific to stage/.

But! Having said that, it's not like I don't want something like you
propose. It might be a useful thing indeed. You'd have to ask dgilmore
for the details of how stage/ is 'composed', though - at least a few
years back I think it was basically manual, so there wouldn't be an easy
way to make this happen painlessly/automatically.

> , the best idea would be to add something like .composeinfo file
> inside the directory, which would contain all the metadata in a
> ini-style or json-style syntax.

can it please at least be the same syntax as *either* buildstamp *or*
treeinfo ? I'm sure there's a good reason why we have both those things
and they don't use the same syntax, but, you know, let's not make it
worse...:)
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
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