Re: [gentoo-dev] Official overlay support

[Daniel Ostrow]

On Wednesday 22 March 2006 12:03, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> Stuart Herbert wrote:
> > I've been very happy with using svn+trac overlays to bridge this gap.
> > They provide a sandbox for contributions to be shared and evaluated.
> > They provide a place where I've been able to give commit access to
> > non-devs, so that they can learn the ropes w/out threatening the
> > Portage tree proper.  They provide a place where people who just want
> > to write docs for a single package can contribute.
> >
> > Overlays create a sense of participation that's lacking with Bugzilla
> > patch submissions.  Backed up with regular communication (I recommend
> > not recruiting anyone who won't spend time in the IRC channels, but
> > that's a personal preference), they help us get things done quicker.
> >
> > The downside with overlays at the moment is that they're scattered
> > around the net, and if you don't know where to look they can be very
> > hard to find.  I've been talking with infra about providing
> > overlays.g.o as a central hosting service for herd and individual
> > developer overlays.  Infra have been very supportive of the idea.  I
> > just need to free up some time to get the service launched.
>
> This definitely sounds like a fun idea. It would be even cooler if we
> were using a distributed SCM on both ends that allowed for easy merging.

I agree, I'd love to see something like this, that way I could have my xfce 
stuff someplace more public then my devspace....the only thing that would 
have to be clear is how official the overlays actually were, e.g. how prone 
the team looking after the overlay would be to accepting bugs via the usual 
b.g.o channels etc.

-- 
Daniel Ostrow
Gentoo Foundation Board of Trustees
Gentoo/{PPC,PPC64,DevRel}
dostrow@g.o