Re: Facilitating user contributed ebuilds (Was: [gentoo-dev] The future of the Sunrise project)

[Michał Górny]

On Wed, 8 Jun 2016 15:16:57 +0200
Alexander Berntsen <bernalex@g.o> wrote:

> It would be wise of us to create a novel way of involving users from
> the ashes of Sunrise.
>
> Here is my suggestion: It would be fruitful to encourage every single
> Gentoo user to have their own repository. And this repository should
> be publicly available.
>
> This way we can merge useful things from people, and they can submit
> pull-requests if they have useful things that are not in the tree.
> Before merging anything to the main tree, ebuilds should of course be
> carefully reviewed. Users could also review each other's ebuilds to
> ensure better quality ebuilds.

Didn't you just contradict yourself? First you tell that everyone
should have their own public repo... then you tell that we should merge
stuff from those repos. So are you targeting split-repo model, or
central repo model, or...?

> This could lead to a future where the Gentoo tree is largely
> superseded. Every user would just have their own repository, where
> they could pick and choose packages from other users. The Gentoo tree
> would just focus on a high-quality repository of the basic/core things
> that everybody needs. Gentoo devs would spend most of their time
> maintaining curated small and useful repositories.

Does that mean that using Gentoo would involve spending hours on
figuring out which repository supplies a package that happens to be
quite up-to-date, build and not have huge security issues? I know it's
Gentoo style but we so far focused on making Gentoo painful with a lot
of useless choices on USE flag level.

> While there is some work to be done to facilitate my suggestion, it
> should be a lot less work than Sunrise was. What we need short-term is
> simply documentation where we encourage users to have their own
> repositories that are available online. Next up would be setting
> Portage up to expect a user repository from the get go. The initial
> personal tree could be fork of the Gentoo tree with a remote 'gentoo'
> that they can pull from (emerge could do this automatically). This
> way, users who do not care at all, can just use Gentoo like they do
> today.

So... are we doing split repos, or now forking Gentoo and expecting
things to magically work when people attempt to merge a dozen outdated
forks of Gentoo?

> The final step is the most difficult (but then again we might never
> get so far). It is two-fold. First we make the core/base repository.
> Then we identify important subsets that can be logically separated
> into repositories, and do this.
>
> Parallel to all this, we should work on tooling. It is unreasonable to
> expect people to be git experts to be effective. The workflows for
> managing user repositories doesn't need the full power of git anyway.
> It would also be good to offer hosting insofar as possible to a set of
> curated repositories we consider to be of high quality.
>
>
> In the end, Gentoo might make a gigantic leap into the future with a
> truly modular distribution. If anyone wants to look at distros that
> get this more right than Gentoo, have a look at e.g. NixOS and Exherbo.

NixOS doesn't work. It's a huge pile of hacks that create more problems
than they solve.

Exherbo is special. You can talk about everyone having their own
repository when you have to deal with around 10 users who also happen
to be developers. It doesn't scale to Gentoo.

> What are your thoughts?

I don't really see how this is relevant to Sunrise. Sunrise failed for
a few reasons, and one of them was that the pseudo-distributed model
that it attempted to establish didn't work. You are moving
in the opposite direction than most of the Sunrise contributors.

You have no real technical suggestions, or even a clear vision. I have
no clue how your idea is going to work, or if it's even a single idea.

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny
<http://dev.gentoo.org/~mgorny/>