On 11/20/2014 12:58 AM, Rich Freeman wrote: > On Wed, Nov 19, 2014 at 12:54 PM, hasufell <hasuf...@gentoo.org> wrote: >> On 11/19/2014 06:27 PM, Jauhien Piatlicki wrote: >>> On 11/19/2014 03:36 PM, hasufell wrote: >>>> >>>> In the end, I'm not sure if this is actually such a big problem. You can >>>> still use random ebuilds from random overlays and commit them straight >>>> to your own overlay. >>>> >>> >>> A bad idea. Bad because of the same reason why copy-past in your code >>> would be bad. >>> >> >> Depends. If a third-party overlay dependency regularly breaks my >> packages, I am going to copy paste it into my own to have more control >> over it. >> >> At that point it is forked. I don't see what's wrong with forking. >> > > What happens when 3 overlays all fork the same dependency, and you > want to use all three? >
I didn't suggest to regularly fork ebuilds and do things unmodular (see my whole post). I was simply questioning whether all this is actually a big problem and if such a scenario of forked ebuilds that diverge a LOT and cause random build failures in other overlays will happen frequently. The only case this happened to me is when people were eager to hack multilib support into random ebuilds (including games overlays). That was really dangerous. > The distributed repository works well for release-based distros since > the core of the OS is fixed. A repository for Ubuntu x.y will always > work with Ubuntu x.y, since Ubuntu x.y isn't going to upgrade from > libfoo-2 to incompatible libfoo-2.3. > > On the other hand, libraries on Gentoo can change without warning, and > the only quality standard we impose is that the main repo still works > (with no forced testing of distributed repos). > > If we want to truly support first-class distributed repos, then we'll > need to impose a number of standards on the main tree that we do not > impose today. > I am not entirely sure if this is just an enhancement or a necessity, but I see your point. But keep in mind that the core is supposed to shrink with this idea of a distributed model! So it would be less work to actually roll/tag releases than it would be right now (or even do that stuff in branches). Exherbo is already running a more modular approach, I'd be interested what they have to say about this or which problems they were facing. I'll probably also dig a bit deeper into NixOS and see what tools they use for creating NixOS based distros.
