Re: [gentoo-dev] creating ebuilds

[Jason Stubbs]

On Saturday 10 January 2004 20:13, foser wrote:
> On Tue, 2004-01-06 at 19:56, George Shapovalov wrote:
> > That description is based around the idea of "splitting" the tree (via
> > the means of KEYWORDS for example, but lots have changed since, we might
> > want another way now) into "official" (with its further stable/testing)
> > and "user" areas (considered less stable by portage. This makes these
> > submissions automatically visible and easy to install for those who care,
> > but retains them invisible (and perhaps even unfetchable) for those who
> > dont).
> >
> > While there was support behind it, there was an opposition as well. One
> > real and I think most important objection is along the lines 'do we
> > really want to stress our servers by all these "unsupported" ebuilds?'
>
> I think that's a non-issue and certainly not the main argument against
> it. It's more about ensuring quality of the distro as a whole, where do
> you put the line of what is Gentoo and what is not, what is supported
> and what isn't. It all becomes a fuzzy area, maybe clear to our users or
> not even all of them, certainly not the outside linux world.
>
> I don't expect newcomers to Gentoo/Linux that now happily use ~arch
> because someone on IRC recommended it -while it really is meant as a
> testing ground for experienced users, to help out the distro- to know
> the difference between the different levels of Gentoo-ness or make a
> conscience choice on what they want. They probably go for 'hey that's a
> cool new alpha quality app on that screenie. Hey more cool, someone on
> IRC says it's in the Gentoo user submitted ebuilds level, i'll make that
> my default level from now on.', getting an unreliable distro in return.
> This may be a bleak picture, but in a sense these things are already
> happening.

A little bit of a side issue, but this is actually seems to be quite a big 
problem. I'm a relative newbie to the IRC channels and haven't really seen it 
on the forums or mailing list, but the standard response to "I'm installing 
Gentoo for the first time - can you tell me what the best method is?" seems 
to be "2.6 kernel and ~arch" from two thirds of the respondents. I've even 
seen recommendations for breakmygentoo to a new user. Another one is "emerge 
says the digest is wrong - what should I do?" with the 'answer' being "run 
ebuild <ebuild> digest".

Maybe something similar to Spider's recent developer-wide reprieve would be 
good in the GWN for the short-term. For the long-term, though, Gentoo "dos 
and donts" or, more to the point, "what Gentoo supports" really need to be 
explained to a new user from the beginning. Coming back to the topic, any 
'solution' that allows user-contributed ebuilds to bypass QA (and even 
breakmygentoo has minimal QA) needs to be thoroughly pre-advised too.

--
Regards,
Jason Stubbs

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