Re: [gentoo-dev] Official overlay support

[Paul de Vrieze]

On Thursday 23 March 2006 19:55, Chris Bainbridge wrote:
> I agree. I would ask, what are the advantages of overlays that
> developers find so compelling that they use them rather than the
> portage tree? Would it not be a better idea to find a way to bring
> those advantages to the tree, rather the proliferation of overlays we
> are seeing?

Well. First of all I use a personal overlay to keep all things not valuable or 
suited for the tree. The overlay repos allows to share them on the 4 systems 
I maintain. The second reason for overlays is to test things in unison which 
is not ready for the tree yet (not even masked).

> > No.  It indicates nothing except that 58% of the 80 people who filled
> > out the poll are "not really happy with the way the portage tree is
> > handled" which by my counts, isn't even a drop in the bucket of our
> > number of users, making the statistic completely worthless.
>
> True. Nevertheless, it is the only statistic I have seen regarding
> users thoughts on this subject. Of course a larger sample size would
> be preferable. There should be more feedback from users - bug voting
> on bugzilla would be a start, why has it never been enabled?

You know "there is lies, damn lies, and statistics". In this case the poll 
only says that of the 80 (small sample) respondents, 58% of people disliked 
the handling of the tree. There are three problems with it. First the sample 
is not random at all (only forum users, only users feeling strong enough to 
respond). Second the sample is fairly small in relation to the user base. 
Finally, the question is suggestive, so biassed to disliking of the tree. The 
8% could very well already be caused by suggestive questioning, not to speak 
about the sample selection.

Paul

-- 
Paul de Vrieze
Gentoo Developer
Mail: pauldv@g.o
Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net