hasufell posted on Fri, 25 Jul 2014 15:44:47 +0000 as excerpted: > Sounds like that would be an interesting gentoo project. But afais PMS > doesn't really specify how binary packages should look like, so we will > hit incompatibility problems there as well.
AFAIK binpkgs are purely an individual PM feature, considered outside the domain of PMS. Unless things have changed, paludis doesn't support them at least in portage form and there's active antipathy toward adding that (altho I believe there was discussion of adding rpm support at one point). I don't know whether pkgcore supports them or not, tho if it does, I suspect its support is close to the portage-native form. But while I believe someone's working on pkgcore again now, until it gets EAPI-5 support it's pretty much out of the picture anyway. Gentoo did at one point do binpkg ISO-images, but I've not seen or heard anything of that in years, and of course while they did form a convenient quick-install foundation, they were quickly outdated, and there was no gentoo-only mechanism to continue with binpkgs -- you did your quick- install from binpkg, optionally changed any USE flags you wanted and rebuilt using --newuse, and continued with conventional gentoo build-from- source after that. Meanwhile, it's worth noting that a mostly from-sources distro such as gentoo has the luxury of bypassing many of the legal issues involved with binary distribution. Among other things there's the patent issues that don't normally apply (at least in the US) to source distribution due to freedom-of-speech-overrides, and the gpl source provision (including our patches) obligations as well. Partially for that reason, gentoo as a distribution has in the past chosen to deemphasize binaries and leave most of the binary distribution angle to the gentoo-based distros. That lets us continue focusing on what we do best, while leaving the gentoo-based distros a bit more space to work on what they can do better. While there'd certainly be some convenience to a binaries server, is it really going to be worth the cost, in legal hassle, in blurring our sources focus, and in killing that exclusive niche for our downstream distros? Meanwhile, a question for the infra and foundation folks: A quick look at the the download links and mirrors says that we're still distributing 10.1 images for at least x86 and amd64. Based on the file-dates on the mirrors, that was 2009, and I don't see corresponding links to sources, which means at least for the gplv2 binaries on those images, we're obligated to provide sources, including our patches, until 2017 (three years from now) and counting. While the ebuilds and tarballs aren't likely to be a huge issue, are we sure we have those patches archived and will until three years after we quit distributing those binaries, such that we can provide them on-demand? If not, those images need to come down. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
