On Mon, 15 Oct 2007, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
I think a good way to start is to make the overlay an "accepted"
solution for where to keep packages. Get more people participating in
the overlay, and even be willing to move packages from the main tree to
the overlay if there's non-devs willing to help with things that are
poorly maintained.
The original cryos' idea when he created the science overlay was a place
to develop ebuilds until they become mature enough to be moved to the main
tree (I can dig his original post about this subject). He suggested that
ebuilds whould, in most cases, be moved to the main tree quickly enough.
Gentoo users are not instructed to use overlays. Most of them just don't
know about them. Hunting for an interesting package in many tens of
overlays present at overlays.gentoo.org is not easy. A package in an
overlay can depend on some other packages in the same overlay, etc. So,
from the user's perspective, overlays are obscure (which ones should I add
to my tree? Where are packages that are of interest for me? Should I
browse all this stuff at overlays.gentoo.org? Oh my...) They also add an
extra layer of complexity (should I install layman? How to use it? Are the
overlays updated when I do emerge --sync? What, I should do this by hand?
Oh my...) And Gentoo is complex enough for users even without this extra
layer of new and unknown concepts.
If we *really* want to divide packages into first-class citizens and
second-class ones (residing in overlays), we should do several things.
1. Inform users *prominently* that some interesting packages don't live in
the main portage tree (currently, not many users know this).
2. Write a chapter about overlays and layman for the Gentoo user guide.
Who will decide which packages are first-class citizens and which are not?
What are the criteria?
Andrey
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