Hello!

> As you might know, the Gentoo KDE project provides an overlay with KDE4
> live ebuilds ("kde" in layman) and some of their dependencies.
 
It's been about 1,5 years ago when I announced the availability of the re-
designed KDE overlay which has since been our playground/testing ground for 
new EAPI features.

Even though I'm not a Gentoo developer anymore I thought I'd let you know 
about our experiences and do a little summary:

- "-scm" support (GLEP 54)
- new .kdebuild-1 suffix (basically GLEP 55)

These two have been very useful for us. Especially the clarity of -scm as the 
version specification for live ebuilds in contrast to -9999, -9999999 or other 
variations like those.

- USE dependencies, including some special operators
- :* and := slot dependencies
- src_uri arrows
- no dohtml, dohard and dosed. 
- no old-style virtuals (i. e. no "PROVIDE")

I'm glad to see most of these features having been introduced with EAPIs 2/3. 
They've made specifying deps way clearer and more concise for us in the KDE 
overlay and improved the user experience as they allow more things to be 
handled up front.
src_uri arrows have been useful in many cases; especially when upstream 
archive names were, let's say, interesting. ;-)

- src_test is now mandatory (unless RESTRICT'ed)

I've never understood all the quarrelling about this feature. Upstream KDE is 
notoriously neglecting the test suites and still, our users and ourselves 
haven't suffered at all from making src_test mandatory with the kdebuild-1 
EAPI. Which is not really surprising considering that we test our packages, 
catch test failures and simply fix or restrict them. No harm done.

- PDEPEND "suggested:" label

The "suggested" label made it easier for our users to decide if they wanted to 
install additional packages in order to enable certain optional functionality 
which is, as we all know, abundant in KDE. With a descriptive label for each 
suggested dependency, making the right decision becomes easy.

> For those of us working on the overlay this means we will be able to use
> exciting new features and hopefully make our lives easier.

This prediction turned out to be true. It has been a fun ride and it has given 
Gentoo three new developers as well - one of which is even still among your 
ranks. ;-)
 
> For Gentoo as a whole this means there's plenty of opportunity to try new
> stuff and learn from the experiences.

Judging by what went into the Gentoo EAPIs meanwhile, I think we helped Gentoo 
make some progress as well. :-)

But, alas, times are changing and, as we've moved forward when we created the 
overlay, we've been working on Exherbo in the meantime. All of the Gentoo KDE 
overlays features were implemented in Exherbo's exheres-0 EAPI and extended, 
building upon our experiences.

Yesterday, Ingmar whom some of you will certainly remember, committed -scm 
exheres to Exherbo's KDE repository. This was the next logical "evolutionary" 
;-) step and many of our users have already migrated to Exherbo or are about 
to make the switch anyway. Others have migrated to the live ebuilds created by 
the current Gentoo KDE team.

Thus, the Gentoo KDE overlay is now obsolete and all further development will 
be continued in Exherbo. I'm going to shutdown the overlay and its resources 
on October, 31st 2009.

Best regards, Wulf C. Krüger