Re: Distribution names are not unique. We need to figure out what to do about it.

On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 8:14 AM, Ruslan Zakirov <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 1:31 AM, David Golden <[email protected]> wrote:
>> (2) rt.cpan.org treated both distributions as having the same RT
>> queue. I gained administrative access to BinGOs' existing queues.
>
> Just to make it clear. rt.cpan.org uses distribution name as queue
> identifier and
> expects it uniquelly identify a "project".

I understand.  That expectation is incorrect.  That's what we're talking about.

> rt.cpan.org would win for sure from a new meta information DB
> published to CPAN mirrors.

Thinking about a mechanism for distributing the information is a
secondary concern.  The primary concern is deciding what is the
correct unit of aggregation and how to ensure it remains unique.

It could just as easily be "primary package" as "distribution name" or
"project name" or whatever.  If that were to be the decision, then
rt.cpan.org would need to migrate its queue structure accordingly.

Most of the options involve a fair amount of work and risk and we
collectively need to figure out the best course of action.

Other than (a) do nothing, I think the (c) restrict PAUSE to
well-formed distributions option is probably the least amount of work
and risk (I could probably patch PAUSE in a few hours to do so), but
we might regret the number of edge cases involved (non-module
distributions) and might take a lot of flak for the new, stricter
rules.

I like Schwern's data model conceptually, but I cringe at the amount
of work required to make it happen in PAUSE (including a permissions
system around it) and PAUSE surgery feel like high risk to me.

Seems clear to me that we're going to wind up with a "least worst" option.  :-)

David

-- 
David Golden <[email protected]>
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