On Wed, Jun 8, 2016 at 9:16 AM, Alexander Berntsen <berna...@gentoo.org> wrote: > > This could lead to a future where the Gentoo tree is largely > superseded. Every user would just have their own repository, where > they could pick and choose packages from other users. The Gentoo tree > would just focus on a high-quality repository of the basic/core things > that everybody needs. Gentoo devs would spend most of their time > maintaining curated small and useful repositories. >
Do you propose that you can have cross-repo dependencies? If so that creates a lot of potential issues, even if you do it the NixOS way. Suppose you have 10 packages, and they each depend on zlib from a different repository? If they collide, that is one problem to solve. If they don't collide then you have 10 copies of zlib now, and good luck making sure they're all secure, and of course now you're multiplying the number of "shared" objects you keep in RAM. If you only allow dependencies back to the main repository then that is a pretty big limitation, and I don't see there being any kind of fundamental transformation in how Gentoo operates that way. Don't get me wrong - I'm all for distributed repositories. I just think there are some big challenges if we want to have them largely supersede the main repo. I do think that leveraging git makes a lot of sense if your goal is to facilitate movement into the main tree. It also has benefits even if the repos are all stand-alone, since you at least have unique hashes and such to refer to from a version control standpoint, vs just files stored in a random directory tree somewhere with no way to tell if any have changed and how. -- Rich
