Re: [gentoo-amd64] Re: Heads-up: KDEers: Particularly kde3-ers,

[Mark Knecht]

On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 8:36 AM, Arttu V.<arttuv69@×××××.com> wrote:
> On 8/27/09, Mark Knecht <markknecht@×××××.com> wrote:
>> Moral of the story - don't trust portage to support your machine
>> tomorrow just because it works today, and don't expect portage
>> maintainers to care. The response you'll get, if you get one at all,
>> is 'be a man, create your own overlay, be responsible for your
>> machine, and shut up'.
>
> Given the possibly large-ish number of folks trying to run Gentoo on
> older hardware with similar problems, and given that there already are
> overlays for "bleeding edge" (qting-edge, kde-crazy, everything with
> live-scm ebuilds etc), maybe some of the old hw owners should organize
> a bit and try to pool their time into, e.g., a "grandpas-trusty"
> overlay with much of the old ebuilds easily available or something.
>
> I think it has already been suggested and considered that everything
> that gets removed from portage would instead get moved into some
> "old-stuff-dump" overlay, but I just don't have the time to look up
> any references and discussion over it right now ...
>
> Naturally it is not a perfect solution as bit-rot will inevitably get
> you when things like APIs and ABIs change enough, but just not having
> to hunt down everything from Attics (not to mention patch-packages and
> the original sources) into local overlays would probably be a
> considerable time-saver.
>
> But once again, it comes down to the question "ok, maybe it could
> work, who'll do it?" The regular devs seem to be pretty occupied given
> their current workload, so they might not have the extra oomph saved
> for this.
>
> --
> Arttu V.

Yes, the 'who' is always a big question in open source, and the only
reliable answer I've seen is 'the person who wants to', which
unfortunately can change over time.

It's not an answer to the whole problem as it wouldn't allow me to
build an old machine from scratch but I'd love to see some little
daemon that ran on my system and noticed when something I currently
had installed was being removed from portage. If it see this it would
automatically moved a copy of ebuilds and distfiles into some sort of
a local 'in-use' overlay so they'd still be available to me on this
machine. With something like that at least then nothing would be lost.
Maybe then there's a little app to allow me to remove it from the
overlay when I'm done wit it, or I'd do it by hand.

What I dislike about the current system is some person out there in
the ether deciding what's right for my hardware with the main criteria
being what's easy for him. Yes, I can, by hand and with time and
training, eventually find and replace things I need, but I have never
thought the way it is working now was the right way.

- Mark