Sorry if the previous thread was hijacked by naming issues, but I'm not 
sure I'm ready to vote in a poll yet.

To me, only two of the options are seriously being discussed right now:

  1) the current target-group codebase
  2) moving the behaviour of target-group into all targets through a 
marker attribute

On first glance, changing target-group to a target with a marker 
attribute looks like a NOP, but this is not necessarily true. As you 
pointed out before, Stefan, targets are used in quite a lot of contexts 
and in some of those contexts (like import) things might get a bit 
confusing if we just substitute a the target-group concept in for a target.

My question is whether we need to provide different behaviour under any 
circumstances between a target and what we now call a target-group 
(other than the obvious extension of dependencies). If they can be 
treated as completely equivalent I'd favour what I've labelled as option 
2 above. If there are circumstances where, for example, you couldn't add 
a dependency to a suitably marked target because of namespace issues or 
import issues or whatever, then I would vote for option 1 above, so as 
to make it clear to the user that there are considerations that need to 
be made when using the target-group construct.

Can anyone give a concrete example where there would be a problem 
treating a target-group as if it were a target?

Stefan Bodewig wrote:
> before we get carried away with naming discussions ...
>
> Currently I don't feel there is consensus of what we'd like to see with
> target-group (if anything at all).  The options I see are
>
>   * have some sort of composite of targets that other targets can add
>     themselves to
>
>   * have some special construct that has a depends list similar to
>     target.  targets can depend on such a construct and add themselves
>     to the depends list (the current code base).
>
>   * allow targets to add themselves to the depends lists of any other
>     target
>
>   * allow targets to add themselves to the depends lists of targets that
>     in some way mark themselves as being open for such extensions
>
>   * no target-group like construct at all
>
>   * something completely different?
>
> What is your preference?
>
> Stefan
>
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