On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 9:57 AM, Aaron W. Swenson <titanofold@g.o> wrote:
> I don't understand how this would be painful. In my mind:
>
>  $ cp ~/github/collab/cat/pkgfile.ebuild ~/gentoo/gentoo-x86/cat/pkg/
>  $ cd ~/github/collab/cat/pkg
>  $ # Follow normal commit steps here.

Then realize that you just committed an ebuild that lacks some fix the
foo.eclass team quietly made to the previous ebuild when making some
tree-wide tweak.

In maintaining the mythtv ebuilds one of the things I've noticed is
that it is not always easy to keep tree ebuilds in sync with an
external overlay, because people do stuff to the tree all the time
without involving the maintainers.  Usually these are relatively small
changes that are good from a quality perspective (often related to
dependencies/etc), or just stuff like package moves/virtuals/etc, but
the bottom line is that if you just merge some change from an overlay
without doing some checks you can end up with a regression.

So, if people are going to submit patches to help out it is best that
those patches be against what is actually in portage and not some
slowly diverging repository.  The only way to really address this is
to somehow apply changes automatically back into the overlay, but that
has issues as well.

In a git-based world with easy branching/etc this would likely be less
of a problem...

Rich