Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: George Shapovalov <george@g.o>
To: gentoo-dev@g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] Several portage trees
Date: Fri, 25 Apr 2003 19:02:59
Message-Id: 200304251202.05273.george@gentoo.org
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-dev] Several portage trees by Peter Fein
1 On Friday 25 April 2003 08:10, Peter Fein wrote:
2 > > > I was wondering about having several portage trees to allow external
3 > > > distributor having repositories of packages.
4 > I think a note saying "DON"T DO THIS UNLESS YOU REALLY KNOW WHAT YOU'RE
5 > DOING", as is done elsewhere would suffice. Given the recent volume on
6 > ebuild approval, that's not much of an counter-argument. I agree that
7 > inclusion in Gentoo-proper is a worthy goal - but as a user, not being
8 > restricted to blessed packages should be my choice (and of course, no one's
9 > under any obligation to support any of this to begin with, but it's worth
10 > discussing). Maybe I'm less scared of stability issues running Gentoo on a
11 > home box that could erupt into flames without causing me much distress, but
12 > this should be a matter of choice, rather than a policy enforced by
13 > software. Such a scheme may actually speed up package acceptance, as it
14 > provides a wider test base prior to inclusion.
15 While I agree that providing the option for users to easily get a hold on
16 "unapproved" ebuilds is nice and goes along the lines of gentoo phylosophy
17 (to allow user break his system as he wishes ;), provided the usual
18 disclamer) I do not think separate branch is an answer or even a good idea at
19 all.
20 Granted, debian and pretty much every large binary distribution have brancesh,
21 but bear in mind that they are exactly this: binary distribution. We are
22 talking about much stricter (and in that respect contradicting) goals and
23 central amintaince of these branches. Now, because of higher flexibility
24 central maintaince is not really an option in our case and actually goes
25 completely against the purpose of this proposed branch...
26 (I personally don't thunk we need branches even for specialized stuff. We have
27 a very flexible mechanism - profiles - in place that allows to form a very
28 specialized distribution off the general tree)
29
30 So, lets talk about user-land.
31 If you are talking about this seriously, you should consider the amount of
32 ebuilds you will have to sotre and process and what work is involved and what
33 kind of "service" are you going to provide.
34 My estimate is that you can easily get 500+ ebuilds if you just go through
35 bugzilla (I just quickly searched for "new" in the subject) and eventually
36 the number will hit the range of thousands. So, do you want to just pile them
37 all up in a loooong list? You will have to do some kind of processing and
38 arrangement on all these ebuilds.
39
40 Lets see: Joe User wants to see what's available in this "freaky" stuff he
41 heard so much about on some topic. I can imagine him going like that:
42 "Oh, there was some noise recently on creating that freaky-branch, should be
43 cool to see what's in there. What? Its like 1000+ ebuilds there, how am I
44 going to make sence of it ever. Did these guys set-up a search engine yet?
45 Fortunately they did (because it's been half a year into this project
46 already :)). Well, I found some stuff, I'ts good they also copied all the
47 bugzilla correspondence here, so that I can have some idea on what's the
48 status of this ebuild! But wait, I remember somebody announcing a really neat
49 thing few weeks ago on -dev, why don't I see it here. How can some people be
50 so inconsiderable as not to use this freaky-branch stuff? Sure I know its in
51 bugzilla, but it is sooo boring to go there and search, even though not any
52 harder..."
53
54 Sorry for this improvisation, too much imagination I guess :).
55
56 Anyway, my point is, if you want to make this even remotely usefull you will
57 have to provide quite a bit of service other than just piling ebuilds up on
58 some page. What's more, I think it is quite essentiall to provide a
59 possibility of feedback and appropriate ebuild tagging (unless you want to
60 test all these ebuilds for stability and correctness yourelf, but in this
61 case I will start quietly pointing that rectuiters address to you ;)). And
62 somehow all this reminds me of bugs.gentoo.org already ;).
63
64 As you can see I have strong feelings about this type of branching, I hope
65 this serves as an explanation. I apologise to anybody who thinks I was too
66 harsh in this comment.
67
68 So, what instead? Can I point you and everybody interested in the direction of
69 #1523 again ;)?
70 Sure, that bug is lengthy and quite involved, so not many people actually get
71 through. However I do not see any easy way to go about it. Yes, it *is*
72 complex, just what I tried to briefly illustrate and I did not even mention
73 any security considerations (without which it's not gonna be approved by
74 majority of developers), and possible and IMHO quite required automation..
75
76 Yes, that bug was around for like ages already. But if you read it carefully
77 you will realise, that some major infrastracture changes have already taken
78 place (most of that was written when there were no KEYWORDS and
79 gentoo-stable/stats for example). We are undergoing another infrastructure
80 rewamp atm and as soon as it gets near completion I will start updating that
81 bug again (it doesn't make sence to do so before some organizational issues
82 are finalized).
83
84 On a final note I just want to solicit some patience and faith in developers.
85 We do acknowledge the problem and we are trying to address it. Don't forget
86 that we are talking about core infrastructure changes here and it always
87 takes time, especially if we want to stay alive during them :).
88
89 Post final note :). As always, discussion and contributions in other forms are
90 wellcome!
91
92 George
93
94 --
95 gentoo-dev@g.o mailing list

Replies

Subject Author
Re: [gentoo-dev] Several portage trees Peter Fein <pfein@×××××.com>