Re: [gentoo-alt] Prefix-standalone profile has upgraded into dev

[Guilherme Amadio]

On Mon, Sep 30, 2019 at 08:25:12AM +0200, Fabian Groffen wrote:
> On 30-09-2019 09:28:17 +0800, Benda Xu wrote:
> > Jacob Godserv <jacobgodserv@×××××.com> writes:
> >
> > > Wow! This is huge! Congratulations to the Prefix team for their hard
> > > work and the unofficial volunteers that supported them! This has been
> > > so long in the making I resigned myself to it never
> > > happening. Incredible!
> >
> > Thank you Jacob.  It has been a long journey since around ~2005
> > (@Fabian, correct me if I am wrong).  Prefix has gradually matured over
> > the years, with love from all of us in the community.
>
> I joined in 2005.  At that time there were a few hundreds of packages
> keyworded for ~ppc-macos.  Main people that had been working on there
> (that I know of) were ferringb, kito, pvdabeel, gongloo and j4rg0n.  The
> project started as Gentoo for Mac OS X.  Around 2008 this became Gentoo
> Prefix (as we know it today) because a shift was made from installing
> "missing" software on Mac OS X in the usual locations (/usr/bin, etc.)
> to installing replacement software in a different location, replacing
> host software, and therefore relying as little as possible on that
> software.  Initially it was easy to use Mac OS X's provided software,
> because it was up-to-date, but as time went, the software became
> outdated (think of automake/autoconf, often a problem) and problematic
> (Apple-specific modifications, or unfixed bugs because of old versions).
> Thus the only way forward was to install as much as possible Gentoo
> "versions", the sole aim of Gentoo Prefix.

I joined Gentoo as a dev as side effect of having bought an iMac in
2010 and preferring prefix over a dual boot (I use Gentoo since 2002).
Gentoo prefix is such a great way of using Gentoo on other systems!

These days I'm mostly maintaining sci-physics/root and related packages,
as I work on it, and I use prefix mostly on Linux, instead of Mac OS X.
I can attest that stability has improved immensely as I recently had a
prefix with almost 2k packages installed on Linux (now I have 1.3k
packages "only"), and I've had ~700 packages installed with prefix on
Mac OS X. Bootstrapping could certainly be improved, but once a system
is bootstrapped, it's really nice to use.

> > The feeling that Prefix would remain an experimental project was real.
> > But as the quality of Prefix steadily grows, we could envision it to be
> > of production level hereafter.
>
> I'm happy to see it more mature for the Linux platforms.  We've always
> been struggling to keep it "working".  Historically, the macOS "target"
> was best supported, followed by Solaris, but as these platforms
> continued to evolve, or age, we couldn't always keep up fixing the
> packages and bootstrap process.  Even today this is the case.
>
> There were a lot of contributors as wel as Gentoo devs that came and
> went over the years, making countless efforts and spending many hours to
> analyse, test and fix packages, processes or scenarios.  For those of
> you, if you're still watching, your input has been vital for making the
> project what it has become today.  It's still running, and for some
> scenarios still working fine/being super useful.

+1 for this. And to give an idea of how useful it can be, I should say
that since a couple of years, I've been participating in the packaging
group of the HEP Software foundation¹, where I am advocating for the use
of Gentoo prefix to manage software distribution for LHC experiments via
CERN's CVMFS file system, which is where I install the prefixes above.
Benda is even going to present about Gentoo prefix in an international
conference for high energy physics² next November, so the impact this can
have if we decide to use it in the end is really big. Thank you so much
for all Gentoo devs and contributors that make this possible!

1. https://hepsoftwarefoundation.org/workinggroups/packaging.html
2. https://indico.cern.ch/event/773049/contributions/3473274/

Best regards,
-Guilherme

>
> Thanks a lot,
> Fabian
>
>
> > Big cheers to us all.
> >
> > Yours,
> > Benda
> >
>
> --
> Fabian Groffen
> Gentoo on a different level