On Thu, 2006-03-23 at 18:55 +0000, Chris Bainbridge wrote: > On 23/03/06, Chris Gianelloni <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Thu, 2006-03-23 at 16:40 +0000, Chris Bainbridge wrote: > > > If the software a user wants is in an overlay, then the user will be > > > forced to install the overlay. > > > > It shouldn't be in the overlay, is I think the point many are trying to > > make. If the software is good enough for any of our users, it should be > > good enough for the tree. > > I agree. I would ask, what are the advantages of overlays that > developers find so compelling that they use them rather than the > portage tree? Would it not be a better idea to find a way to bring > those advantages to the tree, rather the proliferation of overlays we > are seeing?
The advantages we see are: We use it as a staging area for our herd's ebuilds. We can start with an untested ebuild and between several team members and outside testers we can iteratively test and refine the ebuild. This relies on a low latency between committing changes and other devs and outside testers receiving those changes. We have a lag of several seconds rather than 30 minutes for the anoncvs. It means we get much higher QA before ebuilds actually end up in portage because by the time they get there they have been reviewed and tested by other team members and outside helpers (often including testing on several arches). If we did this in the cvs tree we'd need to keep the packages masked all the time we were improving them (overhead). We'd need changelog entries for every change (overhead). We wouldn't be able to share the development and testing with our outside helpers (due to anoncvs lag). And of course we wouldn't be able to grant out outside helpers write access. So the lower latency helps to run an AT-style system and the write access allows for a safe intermediate stage in the recruitment process between AT and dev status. -- Duncan Coutts : Gentoo Developer (Haskell herd team lead) email : dcoutts at gentoo dot org -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
