[gentoo-dev] Re: QA Overlay Layout support.

[Duncan]

Caleb Cushing <xenoterracide@×××××.com> posted
81bfc67a0903022319j38aba363nbb46e272e26be0f7@××××××××××.com, excerpted
below, on  Tue, 03 Mar 2009 02:19:29 -0500:

> second. I generally think anything beyond a personal overlay is crap.
> All these overlays like sunrise, java-overlay, and on and on...
> basically official, overlays that have qa and are pretty stable. are
> crap. they should be in the tree. an overlay for developers is fine, you
> know. where you are working on stuff... stuff that someone who wouldn't
> want to hack on it wouldn't want, because it's too broken.
>
> but one of the few good things about gentoo, in relation to other
> distro's, 1 tree no repos, continues to fall further and further apart.

This is the question I was asking myself as well, reading the OP.  Yes, I 
see the policy of not putting otherwise stable Java apps in the tree, but 
why?  If they're reasonably stable, why aren't they in the tree to begin 
with?  If there's a reason not to be comfortable having them in the tree 
unmasked, then in the tree masked (tho in that case, are they really so 
stable after all?).  But why have overlays all over for basically stable 
stuff, that has the usual QA done already, but simply isn't in the tree?

If that were taken care of it would go a very long way to killing the 
entire problem, since it'd only be hack/unstable overlays left in the 
first place, and stacking that hack on unstable on hack isn't a good idea 
anyway.  The problem is thus one of not having reasonably stable stuff in 
the tree where it arguably belongs, thus creating a problem with stacking 
multiple levels of main/stable/slightly-less-stable/unstable/really-
unstable/suicide all on top of each other.

That said, I do understand the reason for Sunrise, as it by original 
definition and practice really is a hack level overlay even if it does 
get some level of Sunrise-dev love and guidance.  But as such, once 
again, there's little reason to stack it with anything else, including 
the personal overlays of those involved.

At least, that very quickly becomes the case as soon as there's a useful 
way to mass-package-unmask, mass-package-keyword, and package-set, and 
the various projects already have working if not all that easy solutions 
for the first two and sets are available in portage-2.2.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman