Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] New metastructure proposal

[Petteri Räty]

Alexandre Buisse kirjoitti:
> Hi everyone,
>
> as everyone probably noticed, there is a current atmosphere of sinking ship,
> with quite a lot of people leaving and many agreeing that gentoo is no fun
> working on anymore. Before it's too late, I'd like to propose a big reformation
> that would help solve some of the issues we are currently having and,
> hopefully, bring back some of the fun we all had developing and using this
> distribution.
>

I can say that inside all the teams I work with things are just fine and
fun as ever. :)
IMHO it's just this mailing list that is perceived rotten in some
people's eyes. Only time time will if the ongoing changes will help.

>
> The idea is pretty simple: modularization. There is a core part, with a couple
> hundred packages that are absolutely necessary to a system. Then we have a
> hierarchy of overlays with additional ebuilds for people's need. Top-level
> projects could look like: desktop, dev, business, embedded, misc. Then we
> would have subprojects, e.g. multimedia, DE, games for desktop, multimedia
> being itself subdivided in audio and video, and so on. This would get us a
> tree of arbitrary depth, with development happening mostly in leaves. The
> hierarchy would mostly serve as a classification tool, and projects would not
> necessarily share resources, including devs, with their subprojects, neither
> should they have decision power over them.
>

Splitting the tree is a nice idea but first we would need to solve the
problems that have come up in previous threads about this some of which
you outline later.

>
> By having everything as modular as possible, we also allow an easy fork of a
> single project, for whatever reason. So if enough people think that mozilla is
> being badly maintained by the current project and that people in it don't want
> or can't apply their fixes, they can easily provide their own overlay with
> better ebuilds.  And if their version is indeed better, over time it will get
> the official status and have superseeded smoothly the first project. Think of
> paludis and pkgcore vs portage.
>

Hmm. Should I emerge mozilla-firefox from module A or module B. Both
have web sites claiming theirs is better. Flame on. Maybe we should just
focus on QA being able to kick out people who do a lousy job.

Regards,
Petteri