Gentoo Archives: gentoo-osx

From: Grobian <grobian@g.o>
To: gentoo-osx@l.g.o
Subject: [gentoo-osx] The road ahead?
Date: Sun, 30 Oct 2005 10:49:35
Message-Id: 20051030104901.GA15227@gentoo.org
1 Since it "is silly if you want things to work before several years off"
2 [1], perhaps it's not that useful to discuss this issue. However, we
3 can all dream, can't we, so let's just do it(tm).
4
5 I will try to carve a few roads in the sand in this mail that should
6 somehow reflect what I think the things to discuss are, if we really
7 want to get moving towards our holy grail. Considering [1], this might
8 be all useless afterward, but ok.
9
10 My personal targets for this project are as follows:
11 1. Make Gentoo for OSX an acceptable sub-project of the Gentoo family.
12 2. Get a prefixed install to make Gentoo for OSX comparative to Fink and
13 Darwin Ports, and quality wise go beyond.
14
15 Both two targets require some extra explanation.
16 1. Gentoo for OSX functions as "black sheep" of the Gentoo family. In
17 that way we put a spell on not only ourselves, but also on the
18 Gentoo/Alt project -- which is a good candidate for the second black
19 sheep. It may be just that some people don't like the smell of non
20 GNU/Linux stuff, but there are also constructive comments which
21 cannot be denied.
22 - My current stategy is to just show some goodwill, by for instance
23 reacting swift and accurate to security bugs, as my impression is
24 that those have been ignored in the past. But not only securty
25 bugs, all bugs where we get involved I try to react within
26 reasonable time, just to show we care. Well I do. Of course any
27 support in this gets a warm welcome from me.
28 - In cooperation with others (mostly vapier) I try to reduce the
29 ebuild "spam" caused by ppc-macos. An example is the big
30 anti conditional bug [2] which unfortunately hasn't got much of
31 my attention yet. The idea is simple: make unconditional stuff
32 just to ease maintenance and keep ebuilds slim and pure.
33 2. A prefixed install for me means having a way to install into
34 /Library/Gentoo, /Gentoo, /Users/Library/Gentoo or wherever. I don't
35 really care about the location, and a system wide install would be
36 fine with me too. I envision that a touch discussion on variable
37 prefixes, or homedir prefixes and whatever will follow if not yet
38 have been on the portage channels. What I would like to see is that
39 we can play with it, maybe not in its ideal state, but those
40 improvements can be made while we're playing.
41 - Although I have seen signals that we're close to something like
42 this (kudos to Kito and Brian) in the mean-while I try to cope with
43 the bugfloods ;). Keywording the low-hanging fruit (those ebuilds
44 with little or none USE-flags that just compile out of the box)
45 reduces the number of open bugs and should be ok when in a prefix
46 too. Having more keyworded in portage prepares us a bit for the
47 grand "Fink challenge" too.
48 - To reach a good quality we will have to reenable the normal
49 keywording scheme again. This will only be done once we have a
50 prefixed installer. From that point, the imlate scripts and such
51 count for us too. Problem there is that we will have to maintain
52 the whole tree, like for instance the AMD64 guys do. We're
53 outnumbered and hence I think we could use some extra devs that
54 have more free time on their hands than most of us now.
55
56 To conclude a short note on various flavours of the project, such as
57 progressive and darwin. I am not interested in those myself. My main
58 focus is on the 'consumer product', which should be the mainline
59 product, or the collision-protect profiles as they are called now. The
60 fact that I am not interested (yet) into these profiles, does not mean I
61 will never support them. I would just like to focus on getting the
62 mainline (normal users) product going, then if people have a personal
63 target to create a progressive profile for instance, I will not stop
64 such development -- not even wondering on how I would be able to stop it
65 anyway. I consider one of my personal wishes for a 64-bit install to
66 be a profile that should walk the same path like a progressive profile:
67 it should wait till there is a working mainline product.
68
69
70 [1] ciaranm@g.o in gentoo-alt@g.o (not archived on gmane)
71 [2] http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=108029
72
73 --
74 Fabian Groffen
75 Gentoo for Mac OS X Project -- Interim Lead
76 --
77 gentoo-osx@g.o mailing list

Replies

Subject Author
Re: [gentoo-osx] The road ahead? Stroller <stroller@××××××××××××××××××.uk>
Re: [gentoo-osx] The road ahead? Lina Pezzella <J4rg0n@g.o>
Re: [gentoo-osx] The road ahead? Kito <kito@g.o>