[gentoo-project] PMS

[Steve Long]

Just a quick post re something that was raised in the council meeting. My
understanding is that portage is the official package manager for Gentoo,
and will stay that way for the conceivable future. Other package managers
are supported as much as any other externally-hosted project is supported,
although they can in a sense be considered downstream of Gentoo.

In a meeting of the last council:
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/council/meeting-logs/20070816.txt
the consensus seemed to be that it is important as:
<wolf31o2|work> if the document is incorrect and a package manager is
released following the incorrect spec, you *will* break boxes

It was brought in-house as there had been no development on the spec for a
substantial period of time, and it was holding up portage releases.
Additionally:
<vapier> if the route we're going is that we dont add crazy things to
EAPI/PMS unless we cover it in gentoo-dev, then having it be with the
current package manager would lessen that maintenance

The question which came up was:
<robbat2> if we fork it to inhouse, will the inhouse fork still have enough
momentum?
As there had been no movement on the document for a year, it didn't seem
important, but it is the situation now occurring:
* Philantrop considers the place where the actual *work* takes place as
authoritative until something significant happens in our repo.

The concern I have with this is that PMS as developed by an external team is
now being seen as authoritative for the whole of Gentoo.

<zmedico> EAPI bumps should be based on input from the general ebuild
developer community I think, since the the purpose of EAPI bumps is to give
them features that they want.

I accept that occasional threads are posted to dev m-l about proposals in
PMS, but that is not the same as moving back to a situation where perhaps
the fundamental Gentoo spec is developed by an upstream software provider.

It has technical implications for the interoperability of all package
managers, and if one of those teams is to be responsible for its
development, I feel it should be the portage ones who have the final word
on what is, and is not, "authoritative" for all Gentoo devs writing
ebuilds.

If that's about to change, I for one think it's a bad idea.

Interesting article wrt the cat herd ;) s/guild/team/; s/alliance/project
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_124/
2645-Riding-the-Failure-Cascade
<that's all on one line>
"An effective protection for any guild is to simply have fun."


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