Hello, I'd like to raise another issue I've met again recently. Shortly put, some of our projects are relying too much on their overlays. The net result is that some of their packages in the tree are not well-tested, semi-broken and users end up being hurt by that.
The major project where this can be seen is science. With no offense intended, but I'm afraid that sometimes the team itself is losing track of what has been committed to the tree and what is in the overlay, and especially which versions are compatible. Another similar project having this problem seems to be lisp. From bug #465864 (which points to many other bugs not fixed in gx86), you can gather: "Anybody who intends to use something lisp-related (like maxima) in Gentoo seriously always uses this overlay. There are too few developers in the common-lisp herd, and the main tree remains neglected for years." (by Andrey Grozin) which shortly shows that in some areas the issues are really serious. Teams, what are the main reasons for keeping that much stuff in overlays? What can be done to avoid it? While I can see the benefits of, say, testing extraordinarily experimental stuff in overlays or keeping there stuff that is not intended to land in gx86 at all (like some custom hacks), I feel like just keeping the newer versions of some packages is more of issue breeder to us. Please remember that most of our users doesn't know those rules. If I am looking for a good mathematics package, I take maxima, though I have almost no idea of lisp except for parentheses. The lisp-related flags are confusing to me and ever worse is the fact that the default choice simply doesn't build. Then I try alternate implementations. Expecting users to grep bugzie or some other kind of pages to find that they are supported to install an overlay to properly use package that is in gx86 is not good. The sole existence and use of overlay is causing the gx86 package and/or its deps to be in increasingly worse shape. If the problem is really manpower, I think you should try to work with proxy-maint. If that's not enough, then we need to find a better solution. In the worst case, we may prefer to move some of the packages out of gx86 and specifically expect all users to use an overlay, consistently. But in this case, we should probably consider redesigning Gentoo to be based more on official or semi-official repositories like Exherbo so that all users would have equal rights. As a last note, I'd like to note that I'm talking about lisp that much because maxima is a recent case where I've seen this. But there were even worse things with science overlay, lapack and blas -- including getting the system into a state where neither gx86, nor science overlay packages work. -- Best regards, Michał Górny
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