Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Let's redesign the entire filesystem!

[Rich Freeman]

On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 7:51 PM, Richard Yao <ryao@×××××××××××××.edu> wrote:
>
> I proposed a way that this could work with no effort on the part of the
> Gentoo developers in one of my earlier emails:
>

Then go ahead and make it happen.  If as you say no dev participation
is needed there is nothing Gentoo needs to do to support this.

On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 6:49 PM, Greg KH <gregkh@g.o> wrote:
>
> We aren't Debian here people, we don't support "everything" :)
>
> If you want to support both, great, feel free to step up and do the
> work.
>

Gentoo is about choice, but it is largely about the choices that
people are willing to step up and maintain.

A few months ago there was a big thread and lots of devs said that
systemd isn't supported on Gentoo.  Some devs stepped up and decided
to maintain it and now I'd say systemd is about as supported on Gentoo
as Prefix, FreeBSD, Sparc, or MIPS.  That didn't happen because of
mailing list persuasion - it happened because a few people interested
in making it happen wrote a bunch of ebuilds.  How do systemd units
end up in various packages?  The people interested in seeing them
write good-quality patches and submit bugs, or otherwise work with the
maintainers to commit them.

For those who don't like the current direction, by all means create an
overlay called udev-root, mdev-boot, noinitramfs, or whatever.  You
don't need anybody's permission to do it - just go on github and make
it happen.  Write some good code.  There are several devs here who
might even help you out with it, and nobody here is going to object to
packages going into the main tree as long as they're maintained in
accordance with Gentoo QA.  Create some USE flags where you need
tie-ins to other system packages and as long as everything behaves
nicely and patches are good and maintained, I'm sure the package
maintainers will accept them.

Gentoo already gives its users a lot of choice, but it can only offer
the choices that people are willing to maintain.  Right now I see a
lot of complaining and not a lot of maintaining.  When I see a package
lastrited I don't moan about it - I either sigh or sign up to maintain
it.  By all means make suggestions to improve the transition or write
docs, but simply posting on this list isn't likely to change the
direction the linux winds are blowing.  The forces involved are much
larger than Gentoo.

Rich