A(n) excellent idea, Mitch. I firmly support the idea and the creation and
expansion of this overlay :). It's long since RHEL held supremacy on enterprise
part, let us bring Sabayon in competition too :)If I have any interested human
around me in this kind of project, i'll let you know and bring some feedback !
Good job :D
> Date: Tue, 1 May 2012 14:05:03 -0500
> From: [email protected]
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: [sabayon-dev] RFC: Long Term Stable Portage Overlay
>
> For the last few months I've been intermittently working on
> side-project to develop a "Long Term Stable" portage overlay based on
> Enterprise Linux 6.x Source RPMs.
>
> I've created a git repository at github to share my work so far:
> https://github.com/mharder/lts6
>
> As it stands right now, with about 50 ebuilds, the project isn't far
> enough along to be useful. It's more at a "proof-of-concept" stage,
> but this is a good point to publish what I've got so far, and get
> broader feedback on the approach.
>
> The goal is to develop a portage overlay that offers the customization
> capabilities of portage while also having the potential for long term
> support of the core packages. While this approach is probably boring
> to a great number of Sabayon/Gentoo users, there are places where this
> combination of stability and flexibility may be desirable.
>
> The concept is to use Enterprise Linux (EL) SRPM packages as the
> source base for a set of long-term-stable (lts) ebuilds. I'm actually
> using Scientific Linux (which is based on RHEL) as my source, since
> they've done the work of stripping out contentious trademarks.
>
> I was pleasantly surprised to find SRPM packages were structured in a
> way that is fairly compatible for adoption to an ebuild. It is fairly
> easy to convert a SRPM package to a tar.gz package. The contents
> usually consists of three categories of files. The SRPM contains the
> upstream source tarball, which is usually the same upstream tarball
> that Gentoo uses. There's a spec file which is the equivalent of an
> ebuild file. The third group of files is the patches and other
> miscellaneous config files that are commonly found in an ebuild's
> 'files' directory.
>
> Since many of these ebuilds are significant downgrades, the project
> may need to mature to the point where I can put together a working
> Stage 3 before many people can actually make use of ebuilds.
>
> So, for right now, I'm looking for any feedback on this concept while
> I continue to work on it as time allows.
>
> Thanks,
> Mitch.
>
