On 11/05/2012 10:39 AM, Diego Elio Pettenò wrote:
> On 05/11/2012 07:31, Steven J. Long wrote:
>> Are you really missing the fact that by testing someone's overlay, the
>> package
>> would by definition not be in the tree, and you wouldn't have to file any
>> bugs
>> at all, just (automatically) email the output back to the overlay developer?
>
> Which means I wouldn't be filing bugs for the problems with the
> _existing_ packages that are in tree, which is what the users actually
> _use_ by default.
>
> If the users are forced to use overlays to get working packages, then I
> feel I'm perfectly right with screaming at the developers who are using
> overlays for development because they leave users in a sorry state.
Do other people agree that something should be done about this? I see
two reasons to prefer overlays to the main tree:
1) Over time, unstable has become too stable (I know, I know). People
expect things to work, and nobody wants to break working systems
by committing works-in-progress to ~arch.
2) CVS sucks; git is much more fun to use. It also makes user
contributions easier.
The first I think could be helped with a third level of stability, say,
!arch, which stands for it-aint-gonna-fuckin-work-on-'arch'. Devs could
pile anything that's eventually headed for the tree here, and catch
conflicts early. I'm not entirely joking about the name -- it would have
to be clear that this is a staging area and no one should use it in
production. But this is a big change.
The second will be helped by the git transition, but what about the
overlay situation now? For work/school, at a minimum, I need,
* sunrise[1]
* gentoo-haskell[2]
* science[3]
And nice-to-have:
* emacs[4]
All of these are already in git, and run by developers. Why not have
them all (and the other dev-run git overlays) in the same repo? Just
give everyone commit access. Then when you're ready to push something to
the tree, you already know that it won't break anything.
[1] http://git.overlays.gentoo.org/gitweb/?p=proj/sunrise-reviewed.git
[2] https://github.com/gentoo-haskell/gentoo-haskell
[3] http://git.overlays.gentoo.org/gitweb/?p=proj/sci.git
[4] http://git.overlays.gentoo.org/gitweb/?p=proj/emacs.git
