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Hello! |
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> As you might know, the Gentoo KDE project provides an overlay with KDE4 |
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> live ebuilds ("kde" in layman) and some of their dependencies. |
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It's been about 1,5 years ago when I announced the availability of the re- |
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designed KDE overlay which has since been our playground/testing ground for |
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new EAPI features. |
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Even though I'm not a Gentoo developer anymore I thought I'd let you know |
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about our experiences and do a little summary: |
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- "-scm" support (GLEP 54) |
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- new .kdebuild-1 suffix (basically GLEP 55) |
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These two have been very useful for us. Especially the clarity of -scm as the |
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version specification for live ebuilds in contrast to -9999, -9999999 or other |
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variations like those. |
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- USE dependencies, including some special operators |
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- :* and := slot dependencies |
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- src_uri arrows |
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- no dohtml, dohard and dosed. |
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- no old-style virtuals (i. e. no "PROVIDE") |
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I'm glad to see most of these features having been introduced with EAPIs 2/3. |
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They've made specifying deps way clearer and more concise for us in the KDE |
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overlay and improved the user experience as they allow more things to be |
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handled up front. |
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src_uri arrows have been useful in many cases; especially when upstream |
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archive names were, let's say, interesting. ;-) |
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- src_test is now mandatory (unless RESTRICT'ed) |
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I've never understood all the quarrelling about this feature. Upstream KDE is |
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notoriously neglecting the test suites and still, our users and ourselves |
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haven't suffered at all from making src_test mandatory with the kdebuild-1 |
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EAPI. Which is not really surprising considering that we test our packages, |
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catch test failures and simply fix or restrict them. No harm done. |
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- PDEPEND "suggested:" label |
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The "suggested" label made it easier for our users to decide if they wanted to |
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install additional packages in order to enable certain optional functionality |
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which is, as we all know, abundant in KDE. With a descriptive label for each |
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suggested dependency, making the right decision becomes easy. |
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> For those of us working on the overlay this means we will be able to use |
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> exciting new features and hopefully make our lives easier. |
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This prediction turned out to be true. It has been a fun ride and it has given |
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Gentoo three new developers as well - one of which is even still among your |
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ranks. ;-) |
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> For Gentoo as a whole this means there's plenty of opportunity to try new |
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> stuff and learn from the experiences. |
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Judging by what went into the Gentoo EAPIs meanwhile, I think we helped Gentoo |
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make some progress as well. :-) |
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But, alas, times are changing and, as we've moved forward when we created the |
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overlay, we've been working on Exherbo in the meantime. All of the Gentoo KDE |
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overlays features were implemented in Exherbo's exheres-0 EAPI and extended, |
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building upon our experiences. |
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Yesterday, Ingmar whom some of you will certainly remember, committed -scm |
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exheres to Exherbo's KDE repository. This was the next logical "evolutionary" |
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;-) step and many of our users have already migrated to Exherbo or are about |
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to make the switch anyway. Others have migrated to the live ebuilds created by |
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the current Gentoo KDE team. |
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Thus, the Gentoo KDE overlay is now obsolete and all further development will |
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be continued in Exherbo. I'm going to shutdown the overlay and its resources |
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on October, 31st 2009. |
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Best regards, Wulf C. Krüger |
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