Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: Ciaran McCreesh <ciaran.mccreesh@××××××××××.com>
To: gentoo-dev@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] About what would be included in EAPI5
Date: Sat, 16 Jun 2012 19:21:57
Message-Id: 20120616201703.7e9a0820@googlemail.com
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-dev] About what would be included in EAPI5 by Pacho Ramos
1 On Sat, 16 Jun 2012 20:59:18 +0200
2 Pacho Ramos <pacho@g.o> wrote:
3 > > Naah. This is one of those things that requires developers to put
4 > > quite a lot of exta effort in to their packages in order to improve
5 > > the quality of experience for users, which means it's not going to
6 > > be suitable for Gentoo's development model.
7 >
8 > Well, not all people have infinite time to put that huge effort you
9 > sometimes would demand us to make things work perfectly :|
10
11 There are two problems with that answer.
12
13 Firstly, if getting something right takes a developer an extra ten
14 minutes but saves each user one second of effort, it should be
15 considered highly worthwhile. The fact that it isn't reflects very
16 poorly upon Gentoo's attitude towards its users.
17
18 Secondly, most of Gentoo's effort these days seems to be being spent
19 cleaning up self-inflicted problems. "Technical debt" really is an
20 issue here. By not doing things properly now, you're just adding to the
21 problems facing future developers.
22
23 > (and looks like Exherbo developer also have the same problem as this
24 > model is still not implemented there, no? And that is normal, they
25 > also have time constraints for sure)
26
27 Exherbo's generally pretty good at "rewrite all the packages!" type
28 things. Partly that's because there are fewer packages (but then there
29 are much better mechanisms for handling unpackaged packages), but it's
30 also because QA and having a clean architecture are taken seriously
31 there. Exherbo does have := and :*, and makes heavier use of slotting
32 than Gentoo (partly due to having a much better 'alternatives'
33 implementation). It doesn't have parts, because I've not had time to
34 work out exactly how to get the resolver to do them cleanly. Once the
35 package mangler side is done, experience has shown that there will be a
36 very short delay before every relevant package is using it.
37
38 --
39 Ciaran McCreesh

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