Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: "Kevin F. Quinn" <kevquinn@g.o>
To: gentoo-dev@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] New category: net-voip
Date: Wed, 19 Jul 2006 07:02:27
Message-Id: 20060719085732.7ac4ec85@c1358217.kevquinn.com
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-dev] New category: net-voip by Ciaran McCreesh
1 On Tue, 18 Jul 2006 21:40:07 +0100
2 Ciaran McCreesh <ciaran.mccreesh@×××××××××××××.uk> wrote:
3
4 > On Tue, 18 Jul 2006 21:18:22 +0200 "Kevin F. Quinn"
5 > <kevquinn@g.o> wrote:
6 > | > Uh, as far as I recall, you've yet to come up with any technical
7 > | > explanation other than "it breaks one of my pet projects"... The
8 > | > gains of consistency and manageability far outweigh the minor
9 > | > inconvenience.
10 > |
11 > | Scan back through the -dev archives. We've been over this many
12 > times, | in excruciating detail, not that it ever makes any
13 > difference.
14 >
15 > Well that's kinda the point. You haven't. Every time it's just the
16 > same vague "stuff breaks", without anything genuine value of stuff
17 > that isn't someone's pet poorly written toy to back it up.
18
19 Did you bother to search back through the archives? I know I've posted
20 about this ad nauseum before.
21
22 Things that package moves cause:
23 1) Dependencies throughout the tree have to be updated
24 2) Current installations become inconsistent with respect to the tree
25 3) Binary packages go out-of-date
26 4) Increased sync load
27 5) Loss of history, unless the move is performed server-side (i.e.
28 extra work for infra)
29
30 fixpackages makes some effort to fix 3, but it's a band-aid solution.
31 For a start, it assumes the binary packages are all present however
32 binary packages may be archived off-line. fixpackages also takes a fair
33 amount of resource to run, resource that end-users don't need to commit
34 if we avoid unnecessary package moves.
35
36 4 & 5 would be mitigated when/if we move to SVN.
37
38 In my opinion moving packages from one category to another just causes
39 unnecessary disruption to the tree - all relevant dependencies
40 throughout the tree have to be altered, putting current installations
41 out-of-date with respect to it.
42
43 The key issue is that categories are semantically inadequate. Deciding
44 which category a package fits into is subjective, frequently a package
45 fits into many categories yet the category system insists that a
46 package belong to one and only one category.
47
48 Usually these big package moves occur when people want to align herds
49 with categories, which is a waste of time - also it's daft as packages
50 can sensibly belong to more than one herd. Unfortunately we see a lot
51 of it in the tree.
52
53 This week it's packages that have voip functionality that are being
54 moved to net-voip. In six months time it'll be someone else wanting to
55 move all packages with IM functionality into net-im. In herd-speak,
56 these packages could easily belong to both the voip and im herds,
57 should such exist; those providing c++ libraries could also belong to
58 the cpp herd. This is useful, as the maintainers of those herds can
59 each deal with issues in their field. It doesn't matter which category
60 it's in.
61
62 The only concrete thing categories give us is the ability to have two
63 packages with the same upstream name without having to mangle the
64 upstream name.
65
66 Unfortunately the category system is deeply embedded in portage and the
67 tree, so changing that system is simply not going to happen, which is
68 why I've stopped whinging about the semantic inadequacy of the system.
69
70 --
71 Kevin F. Quinn

Attachments

File name MIME type
signature.asc application/pgp-signature

Replies

Subject Author
Re: [gentoo-dev] New category: net-voip Ciaran McCreesh <ciaran.mccreesh@×××××××××××××.uk>
Re: [gentoo-dev] New category: net-voip Stuart Herbert <stuart.herbert@×××××.com>