[gentoo-dev] Reminder: please coordinate with the "subsystem maintainers"

[Diego Elio Pettenò]

Hi all,

While it is true we don't have real subsystem maintainers in Gentoo, I'd
like to ask everybody to shoot a request to the team maintaining a
general area before adding something that might fall into their
development usage.

In the past year I have witnessed a number of breakages due to adding
support for, or entirely new packages, to big subsystem such as Ruby,
XFCE, PAM, and so on.

In the case of Ruby, we've been working hard to make Ruby-NG[1] perform
just as fine as RubyGems, but to do so we need to add custom code to the
ebuilds, and set up running tests and the like. This also means that
dependencies need to be done sometimes in tricky ways; so if you want to
add an ebuild for Ruby-related software, please clear it with us first.

In the case of XFCE, I'll let Samuli talk about that.

In the case of PAM, I'm now (very slowly) running an audit of what we
have in tree [2] and I've found at least two partly-broken modules that
have been recently added to the tree. Since I'm maintaining PAM more or
less alone right now, and I'm just working on the new pambase code, I'd
pretty much like to know and validate ebuilds for new PAM modules and
PAM-using software _before_ they hit the tree, as the audit is already
complex enough on its own.

[1] http://blog.flameeyes.eu/tag/rubyng
[2] http://blog.flameeyes.eu/2010/10/24/anybody-hiring-me-for-pam

-- 
Diego Elio Pettenò — “Flameeyes”
http://blog.flameeyes.eu/

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