Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: [ANNOUNCE] Project Sunrise - Gentoo User Overlay

[Chris Gianelloni]

On Thu, 2006-06-08 at 17:29 +0200, Stefan Schweizer wrote:
> Jon Portnoy wrote:
>
> > On Thu, Jun 08, 2006 at 09:32:13AM -0400, Thomas Cort wrote:
> >> On Thu, 08 Jun 2006 09:20:18 -0400
> >> Chris Gianelloni <wolf31o2@g.o> wrote:
> >> > Please keep the games bugs in bugzilla.  Making this change is a direct
> >> > change in games team policy without any prior notice to the games team
> >> > and without our permission.
>
> We have good instructions on our trac wiki page[1] for how to work with the
> overlay. The bottom of the page, point 6) adresses your problem.

Not really.  You've taken what was a simple and open way of addressing
ebuild requests, and turned it into a closed forum.  With a bug, anyone
with a bugzilla account can *contribute* anything that they want, and it
is all peer-reviewed.  With this overlay, only people that are given
access will be allowed to contribute anything.  Also, who is going to
control access to this resource?  Why *is* there access controls?  I
know that I'm going to hear "security" as a response, but it is a false
one.  We already had a completely open resource where any of our users
can contribute any ebuilds that they want.  You've created a more
restrictive and less useful version of this and increased the workload
on any developers whose packages are affected, such as the games team
with the inclusion of xmoto, which has been rejected in its current
state, and knights, which is currently in the tree *and* maintained.

> > I do not object to the concept of ebuilds in overlays.
> >
> > I do very much object to using any gentoo.org infrastructure or
> > subdomains to do so. If someone is going to tackle that, it should be
> > done outside of Gentoo proper. We don't need to be stuck maintaining and
> > supporting a semiofficial overlay.
>
> This is a problem, that we are working on, see [2]
> It is obvioous to see if an ebuild comes from an overlay or not with that
> change. Due to the good metastructure and project support in gentoo it is
> possible to have most of the overlay-work done in the projects [3] and [4]
>
> [1] http://overlays.gentoo.org/proj/sunrise
> [2] http://bugs.gentoo.org/136031
>     [PATCH] Display a warning when an overlay-ebuild fails
> [3] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/overlays
> [4] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/overlays/sunrise
>
> I am still against the idea of turning this into a flamewar. Better no
> comments than flaming comments. Please - keep it constructive.

Nobody has turned this into a flame war.  We are trying to provide
constructive comments.  Just because a comment points out ways why this
is a bad idea doesn't make it a flame.

The only thing that bothers me is the fact that this was done and is
something that was explicitly stated would not happen with the overlays
project.  We now have a semi-official secondary repository, run by a
small group of developers, allowed to touch *any* package in the tree
however they see fit, whether it goes against the policies of the
package's maintainers or not.  I'm sorry, but this is not in the spirit
of cooperation and working together so much as it is in the spirit of
doing what you want, policies be damned.

Were this limited *solely* to packages that need maintainers, I would
have less of a problem than it being used, as it is currently, to
explicitly work outside of the policies of established projects.  As I
stated several times to you now when you brought up the idea of a games
overlay just so you could maintain packages how you wanted, you're more
than willing to keep packages that belong under the games herd in a
personal *developer* overlay.  However, what you've done here is said
that you're more important than the established practices of another
project, and blatantly disregarded their policies, establishing a
"project" that gives you free reign to do whatever you wish.

Does anyone else see this as a problem?

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering - Strategic Lead
x86 Architecture Team
Games - Developer
Gentoo Linux