[csw-maintainers] Tiers

[Maciej (Matchek) Bliziński]

I'm resuming my work on tiers. I still have some mixed feelings about
it, because the code will be more complicated and harder to maintain
when we implement them. The plans involve an update to the buildfarm
database and the RESTful interface. Also, updates will be needed to
the release procedure. Now, csw-upload-pkg only releases packages into
unstable. After the change, it will be into unstable/core or
unstable/active. Which is it? It has to be decided somehow. Also,
moving packages between tiers must be implemented, and dependency
tracking / checking. Sometimes I'm thinking it's going to just fall
apart. But we've decided that we want tiers, so I'm sticking to the
plan.

While I'm at it, the code and db update is not enough. Somebody has to
actually go through our catalog and assign our 3000 or so packages to
tiers. The work could happen on a less granular level, instead of
processing individual packages, bundles can be processed instead.

To those unfamiliar with the concept, tiers are about slicing our
package catalog into three tiers:

core - packages that we all care about. If a maintainer of a core
package retires, we find a new maintainer for it.
active - packages that have active maintainers and are receiving updates
unmaintained - packages that do not receive updates (e.g. orphaned)
but might be useful to users, so we don't want to drop them completely

The main motivation behind tiers is user expectation setting.
Currently, our catalogs are a big bag of old cruft and new shininess.
We don't want a situation when a user downloads an old package which
doesn't work and infers that the whole catalog is of the same quality.
Dividing packages into tiers will allow us to set the expectations
right. If you're installing from unmaintained, it's obvious that
you're walking in a minefield. If you're installing from core, then
your expectations are much higher.

I'm calling for volunteers - I'm looking for someone to take the our
catalogs and slice them up into tiers. The result will be three lists
of package names, e.g. in a text file of some sensible format. JSON
would be great.

Any takers?

Maciej