Re: [gentoo-dev] GLEP 49 - take 2

[Chris Bainbridge]

On 22/05/06, Ned Ludd <solar@g.o> wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-05-22 at 10:29 -0500, Grant Goodyear wrote:
> > I'm not sure I understand why.  After all, mandriva, suse, ubuntu, and
> > many others have survived quite well.
>
> rpm and apt have withstood the test of time and are mature pkg
> managers, not immature experimental code still in major development.

I don't think anybody is proposing that the alternatives to portage
are ready now. It is more a matter of principle - would you have any
objection to a mature and stable package manager developed by an
external entity?

> >  More to the point, though, it's
> > not clear to me what awful things happen if Gentoo does not own the
> > package manager code,
>
> It should be pretty clear that one of the main problems is letting
> others decide which features we will and wont have and defining our
> standards based on their needs and not our own.

As long as the license is open source, Gentoo is free to apply its own
patches to add features or support different standards before
redistributing it. If this becomes too onerous, it would be possible
to fork the external project and bring it under internal control.

> Please don't forget either that what we know as Gentoo is
> based/built upon the tool known as portage. Everything we do
> (all teams included) revolves around it.

If there were an update to portage tomorrow, based on a new
architecture, which implemented the same command line interfaces, then
most people wouldn't notice the difference. Decisions should be based
on an unsentimental evaluation of the merits of each system.

This discussion is reminiscent of the arguments for and against
relying on bitkeeper for linux development. The difference is that as
long as the Gentoo project relies on open source, it can never be held
hostage like the kernel developers were.

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