Jason Stubbs
Sat, 10 Jan 2004 06:12:27 -0800
On Saturday 10 January 2004 20:13, foser wrote: > On Tue, 2004-01-06 at 19:56, George Shapovalov wrote: > > That description is based around the idea of "splitting" the tree (via > > the means of KEYWORDS for example, but lots have changed since, we might > > want another way now) into "official" (with its further stable/testing) > > and "user" areas (considered less stable by portage. This makes these > > submissions automatically visible and easy to install for those who care, > > but retains them invisible (and perhaps even unfetchable) for those who > > dont). > > > > While there was support behind it, there was an opposition as well. One > > real and I think most important objection is along the lines 'do we > > really want to stress our servers by all these "unsupported" ebuilds?' > > I think that's a non-issue and certainly not the main argument against > it. It's more about ensuring quality of the distro as a whole, where do > you put the line of what is Gentoo and what is not, what is supported > and what isn't. It all becomes a fuzzy area, maybe clear to our users or > not even all of them, certainly not the outside linux world. > > I don't expect newcomers to Gentoo/Linux that now happily use ~arch > because someone on IRC recommended it -while it really is meant as a > testing ground for experienced users, to help out the distro- to know > the difference between the different levels of Gentoo-ness or make a > conscience choice on what they want. They probably go for 'hey that's a > cool new alpha quality app on that screenie. Hey more cool, someone on > IRC says it's in the Gentoo user submitted ebuilds level, i'll make that > my default level from now on.', getting an unreliable distro in return. > This may be a bleak picture, but in a sense these things are already > happening. A little bit of a side issue, but this is actually seems to be quite a big problem. I'm a relative newbie to the IRC channels and haven't really seen it on the forums or mailing list, but the standard response to "I'm installing Gentoo for the first time - can you tell me what the best method is?" seems to be "2.6 kernel and ~arch" from two thirds of the respondents. I've even seen recommendations for breakmygentoo to a new user. Another one is "emerge says the digest is wrong - what should I do?" with the 'answer' being "run ebuild <ebuild> digest". Maybe something similar to Spider's recent developer-wide reprieve would be good in the GWN for the short-term. For the long-term, though, Gentoo "dos and donts" or, more to the point, "what Gentoo supports" really need to be explained to a new user from the beginning. Coming back to the topic, any 'solution' that allows user-contributed ebuilds to bypass QA (and even breakmygentoo has minimal QA) needs to be thoroughly pre-advised too. -- Regards, Jason Stubbs -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list