Re: [gentoo-dev] List of User projects

[Brian Harring]

Skip to the end for a counterproposal...

On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 05:13:14PM +1300, Alistair Bush wrote:
> I was just thinking how nice it could be if we acknowledged some of the
> projects that contribute to gentoo but are actually developed primarily
> outside of gentoo's dev community.  How about a page on gentoo.org
>
> So lets me start with a couple of obvious ones.
>
> kportagetray
> pkgcore
> paludis
>
>
> There must be more than these or else gentoo really is dead.
diffball (the basis of y'alls delta compression for tarball 
snapshots, progenitor of tarsync used by emerge-*webrsync, etc).

> ps.  I would like the packages to be specifically for gentoo,  but there are
> exceptions to this.  as an example openrc (and even paludis to a degree).  If
> you think that there is a package not specifically targetting gentoo that
> deserves a mention please make it clear why.

I'm a bit torn by this proposal; on the one hand, a shout out is nice- 
from a career angle it certainly would've been useful for getting 
some attention/exposure when I first was starting out.

That said, it has some issues with it:

* it'll wind up being a fairly subjective list leading to some 
debates nobody really wants to be involved in (nice euphemism for 
flamewars).
*) the criteria seems to be external projects that are gentoo 
specific, aparently by non-devs/ex-devs.  This raises some questions 
as to what happens for when it's created by a dev externally (pkgcore 
went external a long while before I became an exdev), and what 
happens when the author becomes a dev (I'll be getting my gentoo-x86 
+w back soon enough).
*) PMS was started outside of gentoo, and maintained outside gentoo 
for a long while.  Now it's a gentoo project.  A shout out there 
would've been warranted (spec work isn't exactly sexy, regardless of 
any extra baggage that came w/ PMS), but at what point does it 
suddenly fall off this list?
*) kind of the packagekit connundrum- at least for pkgcore/paludis, 
they were written to support multiple distros/formats internally.  Yes 
they've got traction w/in gentoo, but at what point is it no longer a 
gentoo specific thing, and more of a "it gained it's first traction in 
gentoo" ?  Openrc I'd argue is in the same boat- yes it can be used 
elsewhere, but right now we're the owns extracting the most benefit 
from it.
*) it slights the tools that started w/in gentoo's vcs; consider 
scanelf .  Very useful tool deserving some credit, but it would be 
exempted under these rules.


Instead, if the purpose is a "thanks", why not every once in a while 
put up a news item discussing the tools in question?  Such an 
approach allows folk to focus in on whatever is useful/interesting 
(regardless of origination) and give the same 'thanks' angle and 
public exposure for the author in question.

Note also it'd likely be interesting to read.

~harring