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On Tue, Apr 21, 2020 at 3:01 PM Consus <consus@××××.net> wrote: |
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> |
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> On Tue, Apr 21, 2020 at 07:47:44PM +0100, Peter Humphrey wrote: |
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> > On Tuesday, 21 April 2020 17:58:03 BST Consus wrote: |
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> > |
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> > > ... and even distribution kernel is not an official thing, but a desperate |
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> > > attempt of someone to fix things. |
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> > |
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> > Eh? Desperate? |
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> |
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> Yeah, mgorny likes to do some provocative stuff like forking Portage. |
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> |
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|
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Much of the progress in Gentoo comes from things like this. Indeed it |
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is practically encouraged if you read GLEP 39. While a lot of |
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teamwork/consensus is required to keep the lights on and generally |
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maintain good QA, most of the work of really advancing Gentoo comes |
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from small groups of one or more devs just independently forking stuff |
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and moving it forward. In a fork you can make more radical changes |
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without worrying about breaking things, and then eventually the |
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improvements either make their way back into the original project, or |
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the fork replaces the original. Those who still care for the original |
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do the community a service by providing incremental improvements |
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without instability. |
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|
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The beauty of FOSS is that the code is all free to anybody to use as |
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they wish. There is no such thing as a "bad fork." It is just more |
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free code that anybody can use as they wish. Obviously people don't |
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always work on the things we want them to work on, but it doesn't cost |
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us anything really when they do so, and we're always free to do the |
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same ourselves. |
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|
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There are some QA/CI tools out there that have substantially improved |
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the quality of the distro, and most of them have started out as one |
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dev just creating a tinderbox or whatever and filing bugs when they |
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see problems. The only real downside to this is if somebody quits we |
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might lose these tools - but there are efforts to host them on infra |
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once we start to treat them as part of the core experience. When they |
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start out they're just one dev's random contributions and they may or |
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may not persist. |
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|
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On the topic of portage mgorny is not the only one to talk about |
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forking it. Not too long ago there was talk about a fork to work on |
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an improved DAG solver and other speed/quality improvements. And of |
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course there was paludis and pkgcore much further back. Those |
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projects in part lead to PMS which has improved the quality of our |
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repos substantially. |
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|
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-- |
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Rich |