-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Caleb Cushing wrote: > I'd like to start with, I'm not trying to stir up trouble but since > questions were asked i'll answer them. > >> If you think neither should exist why do you have an opinion about this at >> all? > > I merged the java-overlay into regen2 a couple of weeks ago. as of > right now I've no plans to support java-experimental. > > I'm fine with overlays so long as working ebuilds spend no more than a > few weeks in them. I have my own development branch and half the stuff > that's in there that isn't in the main tree doesn't work. Things like > perl 5.10 have been rotting in an overlay for a year. Funtoo ( under > my direction ) and Regen2 have had it ~arch for over a month now. We > found one bug post release thus far. I filed a bug on xorg-server > 1.6.0 not being in tree. It was resolved fixed (in overlay) (which > another bug clearly states it has amd64 build issues). since when has > (in overlay) been an acceptable solution to a missing package? I said > it before, the reason I like gentoo* distro's is I don't have to find > the repository to get the latest package, that's just a pain, in > ubuntu, in opensuse, in fedora... etc. But no more... officially > supported huge overlays have ruined this.
The single tree model is not the only one, nor necessarily the best one. I understand your concern, but as ciaranm argued in another thread, the issues many people seem to have with overlays are caused by the current level of support by Portage. What we need is better support for multiple repositories, not to drop them. As it has been discussed before, multiple repositories could even foster the development in Gentoo, instead of halting it down - as quite a few people seem to be affraid of. If we can have some repositories focusing in certain areas or relaxing access rules to a few repos, some devs might get more focused and some packages might find new maintainers and or their way into "mainline" Gentoo. One issue that has been raised is about having testing ebuilds in overlays instead of the tree. In a few cases, we have ebuilds in overlays, not because of the lack of QA of the ebuilds, but because of the experimental nature of the packages or because of the difficulty in making packages comply to Gentoo rules. One example of a package that was never in the tree, but instead on an overlay was XGL. It was never considered to be stable enough to get into the tree. KDE-4 work started in overlays and was kept there until 4.0 because it was more flexible to work in the overlay than it would have been to do it in the tree. By the way, KDE-4 is a good example of how work in overlays can help the tree - what we had for 4.0 and have now in the tree was mostly done by people that weren't Gentoo devs. Work in these overlays has lead to an injection of many new devs. ... > users don't know how to hack. the very definition of user says that, > imo. There are developers, admins, and users. admins don't want > overlays, they are supposed to be unstable. users can't hack, so what > do they care. the problem is, an overlay has become a repo, I'm not > sure that it was originally intended for that. Fortunately, Gentoo users are not like some other distributions users. I've seen many Gentoo users working in ebuilds and quite a few working with devs to improve the Gentoo tree. Most admins don't like unstable packages. Unfortunately quite a few of them have to support new (testing) packages whether they like them or not. ... >> Further, overlays are good places to put ebuilds for software that is more >> experimental than what's expected for ~arch. That includes live ebuilds. In >> the >> end, overlays have a (far) lower level of guaranteed quality than the main >> tree, >> for their ebuilds > > because ~arch is supposed to work? take open bug on wine-1.1.16 it > doesn't build on amd64 and yet it's ~amd64. how about that nam ebuild > that has invalid bash that I mentioned? that's some quality work > there. The point is the tree is no better or worse than the overlays > in many cases. If anything, I've been hearing lately complaints about the testing branch having become the new stable branch, not that it's terribly broken. ... > I've probably already offended a large share of people on this list, > now lets see if I can offend a few more by soliciting. I think you'll find a reasonable "tolerance level" in this ml about technical issues and development models. - -- Regards, Jorge Vicetto (jmbsvicetto) - jmbsvicetto at gentoo dot org Gentoo- forums / Userrel / Devrel / SPARC / KDE -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.10 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iEYEARECAAYFAkmvJroACgkQcAWygvVEyAJtEwCfYNY1EuJ4/ZEKOGBtKDX7VtOm mtYAniAof1AWL5GMVtpbpZ1g6LCKf7GS =i3Gl -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
