Thilo Bangert wrote:
AFAIK, we have never explicitly made this distinction clear. if we had, we would have to remove stuff from portage which doesnt live up to the standards.
I'm all for that. In reality we tend to leave them alone until a security issue actually comes up, which is probably a reasonable compromise (since it also takes work to remove them). In any case, failure to completely meet a standard does not automatically imply that the standard is worthless.
it is also not true from a more real world perspective: there are many packages in portage that have a standard which is much lower than what is in some overlays. and there are many packages in overlays which live up to a quality standard way above portage's average.
I don't think anybody has issues with overlays that choose to have higher quality standards than portage. I'm all for that. I'm concerned with the quality level in portage - since that is what we attach our name to. If some other repository wants to do a better job than more power to them!
However, Gentoo cannot endorse "all overlays" as being official repositories, because clearly there is no standard for quality when all it takes to have an overlay is to set up an rsync or http server and put some ebuilds on it.
if you want to exaggerate a bit, we have roughly 500 ebuilds in portage which are maintainer-needed and have only a few users and thats why you want to keep popular packages out of the tree?
Actually, where any of those ebuilds cause problems I'm fine with getting rid of them. I'm certainly not arguing for inconsistency. I'm just suggesting that we shouldn't make the problem worse.
If a package is popular then somebody should volunteer to maintain it (whether by becoming a gentoo dev or by starting their own overlay). If that isn't happening than clearly the package isn't THAT important. This is open source - if you have an itch, then scratch it! Don't just complain that nobody else is scratching YOUR itch (even if it is a popular itch).
In any case, my opinion is that for packages to be in portage they should be of a certain level of quality, and a developer should be accountable for the packages they commit. Anybody is welcome to grab ebuilds out of CVS, screen them, and commit them. However, if they cause havoc then the developer can't just say "but it was popular and unmaintained, so I figured I'd just commit something without looking at it." If a developer is willing to commit an appropriate amount of time to QA then they essentially have become a maintainer and the package is no-longer maintainer-wanted.
