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On Tue, Apr 21, 2020 at 8:09 PM Dale <rdalek1967@×××××.com> wrote: |
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> Yea, -dev gets lively when someone steps on the toes of another dev but isn't that true about anywhere? Gentoo is somewhat of a niche distro. |
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I've commented on this elsewhere, but I think these two are related. |
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With more mainstream binary distros a lot of differences of opinion |
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result in forks. Gentoo is really the only significant source-based |
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distro out there, and we're basically minimally viable as it is, so |
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there isn't much room for forking. As a result we're just forced to |
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work these sorts of issues out and come up with ways to coexist. |
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Look at how many binary distros there are that are nearly identical |
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except for their default desktop environment, or what they use for |
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PID1, or some details around their QA/stabilization policy. A distro |
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like debian is big enough that if a bunch of people get ticked off |
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with a decision you can fork it into two distros and they're each 3x |
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as large as we are. Do that 47 times and we end up with the situation |
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we have in the linux world today. |
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Certainly Gentoo hasn't be completely without forks, but very few have |
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persisted, because we tend to try to let our users have it their way. |
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So, if one user wants systemd-everything and another user wants to |
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stick *systemd* in their INSTALL_MASK they don't have to have two |
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different sets of devs independently maintaining every single other |
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package to accomodate that preference. Sure, not every option is |
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equally well-supported, but that usually comes down to |
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interest/manpower and rarely reflects some kind of top-down policy |
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decision to forbid something. |
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-- |
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Rich |