Re: [gentoo-project] Re: Questions for Candidates (was: Questioning/Interviewing council nominees)

[Rich Freeman]

On Sat, Jun 29, 2013 at 4:35 PM, Chí-Thanh Christopher Nguyễn
<chithanh@g.o> wrote:
> hasufell schrieb:
>> What should be our _priority_? Keeping devs happy or keeping users
>> happy?
>
> Running Gentoo requires our users to make informed decisions all the time.
> As long as the forked or split packages are accompanied with documentation
> describing straightforward ways how to make use of them, I do not see any
> significant degradation of user experience.

So, I thought this was a thread for asking questions and not answering
them, but it seems like this is turning into a general discussion.

Agree 100% that running Gentoo requires users to make informed
decisions all the time.  The question was about split packages for
single files though - not split packages in general.  Splitting up
kdebase is a great idea.  Splitting up apache into apache,
apache-gentooconfig, apache-initd, apache-logrotate, etc just because
the apache maintainer thinks that we should simply install vanilla
upstream files and logrotate is of the devil is a really bad idea.
That doesn't make any user or dev happy, save perhaps the maintainer.

Forked packages are potentially even worse.  Do you want the version
of apache that contains backported bugfixes but vanilla config files,
or the one that has gentooified configs but no init-script?  Maybe
somebody should make yet another fork that mixes and matches those.
Then another maintainer makes a fork with a logrotate script, but they
only include systemd units and not an initd script.

Maintainers shouldn't have to do the work to support any configuration
they're not comfortable testing/etc, but if somebody else comes along
to do it for them, the solution is cooperation, not revert wars.

Rich