Re: [gentoo-dev] A heretical thought? Blessing project sunrise as an almost-fork.

[foser]

On Tue, 2006-06-13 at 11:10 -0500, Grant Goodyear wrote:
> Over the years we've had a fairly consistent stream of suggestions that
> we should open up the e-build maintaining process to users instead of
> just devs.  The main arguments against it are the security issues and an
> expectation that it would add to developer workloads.  The former is
> certainly a real problem, although signing (assuming a reasonable
> web-of-trust) could mitigate that some (at least we'd know who to
> blame).  The latter, however, is conjecture, and the only good way to
> verify it would be to actually try it and see what happens.  Oh, and
> there's also a very real fear that if things go horribly wrong, that
> Gentoo's reputation would suffer quite badly.  Perhaps I'm naive, but I
> tend to think that if we were to advertise project sunrise as
> experimental, temporary, use-at-your-own-risk, and
> might-break-your-system, and even put it on hardware without a
> gentoo.org address and add a portage hook that warns whenever the
> project sunrise overlay is used, then our reputation isn't really likely
> to suffer even if it's a complete disaster.
>
> So, Chris, what have I failed to address that would make this a really
> bad idea?

That this describes break-my-gentoo, that it is as old as Gentoo itself
and that it only creates problems for the 'supported' tree : the
unexplained bugs, the weird errors, the continuous suspicion devs need
to have on reported errors. Keep that stuff separated, don't mingle it
with Gentoo.

- foser