I don't think this (the general idea) is a heretical thought, in fact it was around for quite some time. See #1523 for example, which actually came out of a similar thread back ?5? years ago. (There were no GLEPs back then, for those of you who will wan't to go "why this isn't it glepped?" :). There were no overlays, even no KEYWORDS back then either, so be carefull if you read it - it is quite outdated (half of what is discussed there is already implemented in fact) and uses old terminology.) But then I agree about many issues raised regarding the Sunrise project. The way it is pushed will not offload anything off the developers and is quite likely to do quite the contrary..
The main issue: to make it fly and really make something useable (supported by users, *not* taking devs out of the loop and *not* loading them any more) one (at least) ingridient is missing IMNSHO. That is: some ranking system - for the ebuilds *and* for the users. It was referenced as voting system in that bug, we also had gentoo-stats project (now like what, 4 years ago?) which was not quite the same but addressing similar and more immediate issue. This part of the process (the rankings), taken as an "entity in itself", is not that straightforward (meaning a significant tossing of the design ideas would be necessary) and the benefits are not that vital. I think these were the main reasons it did not take off as a standalone project (e.g. gentoo-stats was restarted a few times, but eventually died). While it is nice to have some idea of package usage (which was the main goal of gentoo-stats) or get some fuzzy feeling on "I (user) rated holier than thou because of my superior ebuilding skills" (voting process in that bug), these are clearly not enough to create something sustained. And I am not talking about ethics here (this is re: ratings for users - this was actually mentioned a few times, so I'll address it right now). A general rule - if something is perceived worthy it will be done, no matter how unethical. Even if we (the devs) would ban this, nothing stopped the users to create something similar on their own (who knows, based around BMG, forums or whatever). The fact that this did not happen IMHO illustrates pretty well that this is a no-fly thing on its own. On the other hand I think that just opening up the barrier and allowing users to easily bring stuff in is just the same no-fly-by-itself thingy. The reason: you have to provide some control over quality or you will get another BMG, and my understanding is (the Sunrise thread was pretty long, so I cannot be totally sure :)) that that was generally accepted. Now, we have two ways to add control: 1. Involve devs, directly or indirectly - this is what Sunrise is proposing and many devs strongly object. 2. Involve users and leave it on their side. There were a few words said about how users would take care of it all, but I did not get a clear idea of a workflow.. First on #1. Sunrise proponents basically say: "we will take care of it all, nobody needs to care". Many devs object: "as long as it has anything-gentoo in its name/affiliations we *will* feel the consequences and *will* have to care". (and now Sunrise poeple basically said that without gentoo in affiliatio it is pointless). To that I'll add that in any case, bacause of the scale, there is just no way Sunrise people themselves are going to be able to keep up. Even if their involvement is reduced to the very basic stuff. (This was implied or shortly noted in some replies, but I wanted to clearly restate it now..) But then, involving users without clear workflow and QC will just create another mess - "just another BMG" as some people called it. So, here we go, its number 2 and it requires some structure. The most fluid one I can think of is a rankings system. For the packages (based on reviews of the code, emerge success, usage testing. Can be a compound parameter or multidimentional. That bug has some details, but not much of those - needs serious redesign I'd say to bring it to present from the past..) and for the submitters/editors - based on the ratings of their submissions perhaps (the most straightforwards one), possibly on a few more factors. So, to summarise: 1. I do agree that in general that (ease of user-side care) is a good thing, however this requires (quite) a bit more work than just setting up an overlay.. 2. (at least) two things - the ease of submission/access to packages and QC/ratings are quite tied together and have to be designed/implemented at the same time. (And there is some empirical evidence to back this up - BMG and gentoo-stats for one) . George вівторок, 13. червень 2006 18:10, Grant Goodyear Ви написали: > Over the years we've had a fairly consistent stream of suggestions that > we should open up the e-build maintaining process to users instead of > just devs. The main arguments against it are the security issues and an > expectation that it would add to developer workloads. The former is > certainly a real problem, although signing (assuming a reasonable > web-of-trust) could mitigate that some (at least we'd know who to > blame). The latter, however, is conjecture, and the only good way to > verify it would be to actually try it and see what happens. Oh, and > there's also a very real fear that if things go horribly wrong, that > Gentoo's reputation would suffer quite badly. Perhaps I'm naive, but I > tend to think that if we were to advertise project sunrise as > experimental, temporary, use-at-your-own-risk, and > might-break-your-system, and even put it on hardware without a > gentoo.org address and add a portage hook that warns whenever the > project sunrise overlay is used, then our reputation isn't really likely > to suffer even if it's a complete disaster. > > So, Chris, what have I failed to address that would make this a really > bad idea? > > -g2boojum- -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
