Hi Nils, thanks for your interest.

> First of, it seems that this daemon will run on a privileged machine that is
> capable of uploading files into the gentoo infrastructure, but it also has
> to deal with no official ebuilds. This does seem rather paradoxical to me.
> Or is it located on the users machine, and then only downloads these
> snapshots?

The proposal states that unprivileged ebuilds will not be served by
the infrastructure. What this means is that the daemon will scan the
main tree repo and registered overlays (those in Layman and/or on
overlays.gentoo.org) for ebuilds using its eclass/format. Unofficial
ebuilds (those not uploaded to the above locations) are excluded in
the sense that the daemon never sees them. The eclass would be
responsible for making unofficial ebuilds behave like live ebuilds.

> Secondly, I understand this as a way to have a mirror periodically check the
> upstream repository for changed, and then respond by notifying the
> maintainer. Ebuilds will be left using these snapshots, which seems like a
> rather small improvement over the current system.

Yes, that's the way it should work. The whole idea of snapshots is to
provide stability. If the upstream repo changed, the maintainer needs
to go and see what changed and how that will affect the package. It
might seem like a small step, but for projects that never produce
official source snapshots, it's a big step to me.

> Or is this a system where the daemon sits in the in the infrastructure and
> creates the snapshot automatically once an ebuild is provided, and maybe
> even then automatically creates new versioned snapshots and ebuilds based on
> the new versions of the source code, and places these on the master mirror
> to be distributed. Maybe with some sort of maintainer having to sign of on
> the new version though?

You could experiment with that, but the first step is to make a daemon
that reacts only to new ebuilds that "ask" for snapshots, for the
reasons I mentioned above.

> And thirdly, there is currently no mentor for this project. Would anyone be
> interested in working with me on this?

You'll have to spam the infra team to see if anyone is interested. I
can clarify the details but I'm not sure if I can serve as a mentor
for this... maybe if nobody responds to my collision checking project
idea.

-ak