[Sugar-devel] critical vs pinned repositories, was New pull request reviewers; Rahul and Yash

[D. Joe]

On Fri, Feb 23, 2018 at 08:55:12AM +1100, James Cameron wrote:

> Information below may be of help to guide you in this task.   [...]

I find helpful this enumeration of critical repositories. This gives me a
personal TODO list to make sure I'm following more of them than I do now.

In checking against the sugarlabs organization page at 

  * https://github.com/sugarlabs

I see something of a mismatch. I'm not sure to what extent it would be
further helpful to refine what is pinned or not.  The set of pinned repos
currently is

    sugar-docs
    browse-activity
    turtleart-activity
    sugar
    sugar-toolkit-gtk3
    sugar-artwork 

but ... 

> Critical repositories are;
> 
> - sugar, sugar-toolkit, sugar-toolkit-gtk3, sugar-artwork,
>   sugar-datastore, gst-plugins-espeak,
 
So, from amongst this set those that aren't pinned are 

    sugar-datastore
    sugar-toolkit
    gst-plugins-espeak

> - each of the Fructose activity set repositories,
>   https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Development_Team/Release/Modules#Fructose

>From this much more extensive set, only two are pinned

    browse-activity 
    turtleart-activity

Overall, a GitHub profile is limited to six pinned repositories. In that
light, the current set of pinned repositories is not bad as a representative
draw from a set that is too large to pin in full, but it doesn't quite go
far enough to support navigating to the full set of repositories enumerated
by James.

One possible improvement I'm wondering about is the creation of one or more
meta repositories which then could be pinned, which in turn could hold
READMEs pointing to the additional repositories, perhaps additionally with
some documentation about important commonalities and differences amongst
that subset of repositories.  This would be in addition to, and
complementary to, and more directly discoverable than having these in
sugar-docs.

For instance, I do not find a 'fructose' repository, but there are so many and I think I'd need to gear up on the GitHub API to convince myself I have checked thoroughly.

Perhaps sugarlabs/fructose or sugarlabs/fructose-meta or
sugarlabs/fructose-collection could be created, and then pinned in place of
both turtleart-activity or browse-activity.

Naming is hard. I see "Glucose" and "Fructose" survive in the link James
gives above, but only those two from all 6 carbohyrate-based names in 

  https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Taxonomy

seem to have been adopted. The full set of 6 terms feels overwrought and not
super helpful to me.  

That said, it's at least *a* proposed solution to the problem brought up in
the original version of that page:

  https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/index.php?title=Taxonomy&oldid=419

To be honest, using carbohydrate names seems like it is a better fit for
hostnames or release names (cf mention of "Dextrose" in the current Taxonomy
page).

As I write this and think about it, I think I'd just as soon see meta repos
'sugar-core' and 'sugar-base-activities' in which the README for each would
mention that they have also been known as 'Glucose' and 'Fructose'
respectively.

So, questions:

  * Is the current way of documenting what packages are a priority sufficient or does some change make sense?
  * Do we continue to try to make all the names there work, or just the few that have stuck?
  * Do either or both of 'sugar-core' and 'sugar-base-activities' make sense as meta-repos as described above?
  * Other comments, questions, concerns, objections, advice?

If it doesn't seem at first glance to be a total waste of time I can work on draft versions of these meta repos in my own GitHub space for further review.

> Comments?  Should the above be added to sugar-docs?