Jesús Guerrero wrote:
Yeah, devs for that as well.
Yup - I think we're actually on the same page. Ultimately quality
matters more than quantity and everybody does what they can given the
resources we have.
Right now it is at least a little painful to get set up with an overlay.
No, it's a matter of using layman -a <whatever>
Sure, and that is fine if overlays are intended only as experimental
development spaces. However, some (not necessarily including yourself)
advocate that it is perfectly fine that the portage tree gets stale
since we have all those overlays. That certainly is a possible approach
to take, but to go that route overlays need to become more robust.
Right now they're really not a replacement for /usr/portage.
There's no policy. Just like unofficial repos for any other distro.
We can't control that. It's outside Gentoo.
Exactly. And, because it is outside of Gentoo - packages in overlays
don't count when we consider how up-to-date Gentoo is. If we want to
say that package foo isn't stale because there are recent versions in
some overlay, then Gentoo needs to take responsibility for the overlays.
That might be as simple as being a gatekeeper - auditing overlays and
booting ones that drift out of control.
I don't think we can do any more with the number of developers we
have right now unless we start dumping blindingly and without any check
every ebuild that we get across.
Absolutely. The whole logic behind going to an overlay-based approach
is that it allows developers to leverage external help more effectively
- a developer can essentially delegate a whole mini portage-tree to some
other entity to manage, simply providing oversight and QA. In theory
you could even have official overlays - which would allow better
delineation of responsibilities (you don't need to grant people commit
access to everything - just their project's overlay).
Ultimately, as you argue, it doesn't make a difference if nobody is
willing to step up and actually maintain ebuilds.
Personally, I like the overlay idea, but right now it just isn't
necessary. In theory proxy maintainers work almost as well, and we're
not really making heavy use of this model right now. If we had hundreds
of users submitting high-quality ebuilds in bugzilla and simply couldn't
find enough devs to commit them all, then a more overlay-based approach
would help reduce the bottleneck of having a centralized group of
committers. Right now we probably have far more devs than proxy-devs,
so the need to delegate the tree further really isn't there.
