Herds and Projects

A herd is a collection of packages with an associated set of maintainers. It can happen for example because of retirement that a herd has no developers but this should be avoided if at all possible. A herd has an associated email address which can be used for bugzilla assignments. This email address is not always herdname@gentoo.org — for example, because of the way Gentoo's email aliases are set up, the cron herd use cron-bugs@gentoo.org (aliases cannot match system usernames).

A project is a group formed for handling a particular general area. A project may have herds associated with it.

Sometimes herd and project names overlap — for example, the sparc project has an associated sparc herd which maintains sparc-specific packages (such as the silo bootloader). This is not always the case.