Re: [gentoo-dev] Paludis and Profiles

[Chris Gianelloni]

On Tue, 2006-05-16 at 23:22 +0100, Stephen Bennett wrote:
> > 1) Is bugsy ready for this, with appropriate categories in place?
>
> Paludis-related bugs can be marked as invalid and the user directed to
> Paludis' bug tracker on berlios.de. Alternatively, if our friendly
> Bugzilla admins want to create categories I won't complain. I don't see
> a need for it though.

This is the exact reason why I would disagree with having this profile
in the tree.  It *is* going to cause more work for bug-wranglers, no
matter how many places you put warnings and notices.  If the profile is
*not* in the portage tree, people won't file bugs in our bugzilla.  If
the profile *is* in the portage tree, then users will file bugs in our
bugzilla.  Anything that we add to the tree, we are expected to provide
a reasonable level of support for maintaining.

If there is a bug in Paludis, since the package *is* in our tree, users
can file bugs in our bugzilla.  Now, you might mark them as INVALID
(which is wrong, btw) or UPSTREAM (which is right), but *somebody* has
to take the time to look at the bug, determine that it is a Paludis bug,
then do the work to UPSTREAM it.  Proper usage of UPSTREAM means
actually *filing* a bug upstream, not just pushing it off on the user,
though this isn't used nearly as much in practice as it should be.

A profile is an even more problematic affair, as it has an even
longer-standing assumption that they are 100% supported by Gentoo.

Paludis supports multiple repositories correctly, right?  So why is it a
big deal to provide the profiles in their own overlay/repository?  I
haven't heard a good reason why the profiles need to be in the portage
tree.  I'm not saying I am against it being added so much as I haven't
heard a single compelling reason for doing it, and quite a few
compelling reasons why *not* to do it, mainly support-related.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering - Strategic Lead
x86 Architecture Team
Games - Developer
Gentoo Linux