yac posted on Thu, 13 Jun 2013 12:15:26 +0200 as excerpted: > On Wed, 12 Jun 2013 15:31:57 -0700 Greg Turner <g...@malth.us> wrote: > >> Anyhow, isn't the gentoo-x86 tree already plenty big enough, without >> every single overlay's ebuilds and eclasses in there too? Personally, >> I'm inclined to wish it was smaller, even if that meant more stuff was >> pushed into overlays > > Actually, this is something I expected to happen soon after we got > overlays but for some reason it haven't. I imagine we would not have a > single gx86 official tree but rather a bunch of official overlays. For > basic installation one would need just the system overlay. Then > everypony could add official overlay for KDE, or gnome or whatnot as one > desires. > > I haven't thought this through in any way but it feels like better > design.
Someone else already mentioned the problem with that. At least currently, only the official tree is tested against, so at least in theory it's quite easy to have conflicts between overlays, and it's certainly much more likely to have packages broken for some usage as they simply haven't been tested against packages in that overlay. The more overlays, the more likely the conflicts and breakage. The obvious way around that is to have a set of "blessed" overlays that get tested against, much like the main tree (only) today. However, that seriously complexifies (good) testing as now every dev has to pull down the whole set of "blessed" overlays instead of just the main tree plus whatever overlays he happens to work on (with some devs doing no overlays at all), as is the case now. The last thing we should be doing is throwing additional roadblocks into the way of reasonable testing, and I believe that's why the split you expected hasn't happened -- people realize that and decide the main tree's the best idea after all. Tho CVS is a enough of a pain that I'm sure that alone keeps some packages and potential devs away. Once it's git, that problem too will disappear, and there will be less pressure to split off overlays than there is now. -- 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
