Re: [gentoo-dev] [gentoo-project] Re: towards a more distributed model

[Jauhien Piatlicki]

On 11/19/2014 03:36 PM, hasufell wrote:
> On 11/18/2014 02:12 PM, Jauhien Piatlicki wrote:
>>
>> On 11/18/2014 04:19 AM, heroxbd@g.o wrote:
>>> Jauhien Piatlicki <jauhien@g.o> writes:
>>>
>>>> It would be probably good to have in the tree only the core components and move other stuff to the thematic overlays.
>>>>
>>>> Then we can have a clear understanding, how things should be: if
>>>> something is a part of the core system, it goes to the tree, if
>>>> something is a scientific packages, it lives in the science overlay,
>>>> if something is a java stuff it lives in the java overlay, etc.
>>>
>>> This is a good idea.  One difficulty: how to handle inter-overlay
>>> dependence?  Either the dependency should be expressed by overlay +
>>> ebuild, or the dependent ebuild should be moved into the "core overlay".
>>> I haven't figured out a clean solution yet.
>>>
>>
>> Yes, this is a weak point of decentralization. We should think how to
>> solve it. The possible solution is using of dependencies between
>> overlays (one overlay says, it depends on other). We already have such a
>> feature, we only need to add more support for it. Example of such a
>> dependency:
>>
>> %cat /var/lib/layman/melpa-stable/metadata/layout.conf
>>
>> repo-name = melpa-stable
>>
>> masters = gnu-elpa gentoo
>>
>> Dependencies on overlays in ebuilds is bad idea I think, as it only will
>> introduce additional problems. Also think what if you need not a
>> package, but an eclass or whatever else.
>>
>> In addition, one question that emerges is possible circular dependencies
>> between overlays. We need a way to handle this.
>>
>
> Sounds like there should be some sort of wiki page/guidelines what to
> keep in mind when creating an overlay.
>
> I guess there are two approaches:
> * make the overlay as independent and consistent as possible
> * make the overlay as themed and reusable as possible
>
> Example: You want to create a games overlay, do you add libsdl,
> sdl-mixer etc to it?
>
> One way to go about it is probably to make a very strong distinction
> between actual applications and libraries/modules.
> So you'd rather have two overlays for the above example: "games" and
> "games-libs"?
>

That sounds reasonable.

>
> In the end, I'm not sure if this is actually such a big problem. You can
> still use random ebuilds from random overlays and commit them straight
> to your own overlay.
>

A bad idea. Bad because of the same reason why copy-past in your code
would be bad.

--
Jauhien