1 |
On Aug 7, 2005, at 5:22 AM, Grobian wrote: |
2 |
|
3 |
> Hi all, |
4 |
|
5 |
Hi! |
6 |
|
7 |
|
8 |
> In the small week that I've been officially on the staff now, I was |
9 |
> confronted with many small things that made me ponder. Before |
10 |
> going into a long mail, I'll apologise upfront for my English, it's |
11 |
> horrible. |
12 |
|
13 |
Don't sell yourself short, your english is pretty damn good IMHO =) |
14 |
|
15 |
|
16 |
> At the moment I have the terrible feeling of being useless, doing |
17 |
> nothing struggling with everything that gets on my path. |
18 |
> |
19 |
|
20 |
You've only been here a week. There is no hurry, you will get |
21 |
familiar with all the things you need to...Its opensource development |
22 |
so people tend to work on their areas of interest. |
23 |
|
24 |
> I'm not really an IRC guy. I know what it is, but in general it's |
25 |
> great in distracting you and stopping you from doing what you have |
26 |
> to do. Due to my time zone, I usually miss the important |
27 |
> discussions too. Hence, I'm thinking of a drastical reduction of |
28 |
> my IRC online time. I have the feeling most of the OSX staff is in |
29 |
> the #-osx channel, but it simply doesn't work out so well for me. |
30 |
> I prefer the asynchronous way of email, it also allows me to take |
31 |
> some more time to type a response. As a non-native English typer, |
32 |
> I need more time to come up with responses. And usually, it's time |
33 |
> zone free! ;) |
34 |
|
35 |
Well I'll be sad to not see you in #-osx as much :( |
36 |
|
37 |
> |
38 |
> I got a fuzzy image of what the OSX team currently consists of. |
39 |
> It's far from a unity, more a group of people somewhere related |
40 |
> because of a shared OS, most of the time. Personally I'm a bit |
41 |
> lost in what the general consensus would be among the team |
42 |
> members. Maybe there isn't even one. There is progressive, |
43 |
> darwin, osx, etc. the arch ppc-macos seems to be a multi-headed |
44 |
> dragon. |
45 |
> |
46 |
> My vision on Portage for OSX is exactly what the name says; portage |
47 |
> on OSX, thus a portage instance next to the original OS, so I can |
48 |
> enjoy the flexibility and package availability of portage and the |
49 |
> sweetness of my OS. I am willing to accept that I can't install |
50 |
> autofs on a Mac OS X machine. Maybe it sucks, but then you better |
51 |
> install Linux on it afterall. A Mac is different, thinks |
52 |
> different, and yet, well... maybe I just like that. In portage |
53 |
> terms this is called "collission-protect". Great! |
54 |
> |
55 |
> Now it seems to me, after paying careful attention to some of the |
56 |
> comments made in the #-osx channel that this vision of mine, which |
57 |
> equals the current 'distribution' I think, can be considered the |
58 |
> unwanted child in the Gentoo family. Ok, it will be always a |
59 |
> bastard child, like Portaris would be, but someone started with |
60 |
> this idea, and got it into portage somehow. How did this whole |
61 |
> thing emerge within the Gentoo community, and what happened |
62 |
> afterwards to get into the stage it is in now? |
63 |
|
64 |
Daniel Robbins the Gentoo founder did the initial port to OS X, |
65 |
Pieter van den Abeele (Found of Gentoo/ppc) released the first pkg |
66 |
installer, setup what little infrastructure the OS X team has and |
67 |
actually started recruiting devs and getting stuff in the tree. It |
68 |
all happened very quickly and half-assed, a lot of people were pushed |
69 |
through the recruitment/mentoring process(myself included) ,the tree |
70 |
was broken many many times(myself included), resulting in Gentoo as a |
71 |
whole hating the OS X project(myself included). Most people since |
72 |
then have fallen off the project, be it out of shame (several went to |
73 |
gentoo/ppc), lack of interest(several disappeared all together), or |
74 |
on to bigger and better things (Pieter is working on some very cool |
75 |
stuff with freescale/genesii as well as the opensolaris project). |
76 |
|
77 |
Which pretty much brings us to where we are today....4-5 of us left |
78 |
wandering around aimlessly. |
79 |
|
80 |
> |
81 |
> Ok, this probably all sounds a bit depressing, or put differently, |
82 |
> quite unpromissing. However, all I need for now is some guide into |
83 |
> the wilderness I guess. What are the (common) targets of the |
84 |
> team? What is it 'we' want to achieve? Who thinks what? |
85 |
|
86 |
Well, my basic feeling is the current method of trying to accommodate |
87 |
Apple supplied userland is futile, its working against the advantages |
88 |
of the portage tree. All the apps in portage are tested/tweaked/ |
89 |
hacked/patched/whatever to work with THE APPS IN PORTAGE, not with |
90 |
3rd party software supplied by arbitrary vendors. In other words, the |
91 |
path of least resistance is allowing portage to do what it does best, |
92 |
manage software that is has knowledge of, instead of us constantly |
93 |
lying to it about deps,etc. i.e. when an ebuild has DEPEND="app- |
94 |
shells/bash", that means it depends on the bash in portage, if you |
95 |
have the bash from BeOS/FC4/FBSD/Darwin/NewOS/Whatever its not |
96 |
supported, and likely to cause problems somewhere down the line... |
97 |
|
98 |
|
99 |
So, am I saying portage on OS X is a dumb idea? Hell no. Am I saying |
100 |
the only way I see it working is overwriting Apple files? Hell no. |
101 |
|
102 |
My personal goals for the project in order of my interest: |
103 |
|
104 |
A self-hosting Darwin OS build-able and maintainable via portage |
105 |
|
106 |
A custom Darwin/OS X installer for specialty applications with |
107 |
portage managing the data (small footprint, SEDarwin/OS X, custom |
108 |
userlands, Kiosks, etc.) |
109 |
|
110 |
A fast, up to date binary package repo ala Fink that installs its |
111 |
software in an arbitrary prefix |
112 |
|
113 |
Each one of these goals is quite a large subject and beyond the scope |
114 |
of this email, but hopefully you get the idea of where my interests |
115 |
lie... |
116 |
|
117 |
The first 2 goals, I work on now, mostly with help from people |
118 |
outside of Gentoo. The last one, is the biggie and requires a lot of |
119 |
work both on the actual ebuilds as well as portage itself. The good |
120 |
news is it *is* being worked on for the next major portage |
121 |
release.....but still a ways off regardless. |
122 |
|
123 |
Sooooo, I guess you can tell I have no interest in the current method |
124 |
of installing things to / or /usr and constantly trying sidestep, |
125 |
hack around, and accomodate portage apps co-existing with the apple |
126 |
userland. Its not practical, is very short sighted, will continue to |
127 |
pollute the tree with ugly unnecessary cruft, and will never have the |
128 |
support of Gentoo as a whole IMHO. |
129 |
|
130 |
I by no means think all of our porting efforts thus far are wasted, |
131 |
as when/if portage has support for prefixed installs, alot of the |
132 |
grunt work of getting things building on Darwin/OS X will already |
133 |
have been done. |
134 |
|
135 |
> |
136 |
> Last, but not least, to get a small impression of the people in |
137 |
> this team, I would like a (very) short intro of those people that I |
138 |
> haven't met yet (if there are any ;) ) |
139 |
> |
140 |
> I hope somehow to become a valuable/active member of the team, but |
141 |
> so far I think I haven't had the opportunity to do so. |
142 |
|
143 |
I've no doubt you are a huge asset to the project, regardless of |
144 |
where your niche is/might be. |
145 |
|
146 |
--Kito |
147 |
|
148 |
> |
149 |
> |
150 |
> -- |
151 |
> Fabian Groffen |
152 |
> eBuild && Porting |
153 |
> Gentoo for Mac OS X |
154 |
> -- |
155 |
> gentoo-osx@g.o mailing list |
156 |
> |
157 |
> |
158 |
|
159 |
-- |
160 |
gentoo-osx@g.o mailing list |