[gentoo-dev] Ebuild Quantity vs. Quality

[Dan Armak]

Hi all,

I want to discuss the following matter:
Gentoo does not have really many ebuilds yet, compared with other large 
distributions' packages (e.g. Slackware) or with FreeBSD which has thousands 
of ports.

drobbins said in his post about teams that each team should maintain a 
development tree and a stable one. Now, for the development tree, it's easy 
enough to go ahead and browse some software directory (or simply the sources 
of some large distro) and create ebuilds whenever it's easy to do so, e.g. in 
all the simple configure/make/make install scenarios.

1. Should we do this? The goal would be to provide an ebuild for almost any 
package to people who want that particular package. These ebuilds shouldn't 
be built as part of the pre-compiled systems.

2. What would be the rule for moving ebuilds from the development tree to the 
stable one? If an ebuild is this simple (configure/make/make install), than 
it should _always_ work as long as the package's Makefile is OK. So it would 
seem there's no point to testing such ebuilds much.


Dan Armak