Re: [gentoo-dev] Official overlay support

[Jakub Moc]

Duncan Coutts wrote:
 > The way the Haskell team manages this is that we don't tell our end
> users about our testing overlay. So we don't get bug reports from them.
> We have three outside contributers with write access to the overlay
> repo. They make changes in consultation with the team. So we're not
> giving complete access without accountability.

Hmmm, that kinda defeats the whole point of having an overlay at all,
IMHO. Of course you can have an overlay strictly for internal
development between a couple of people, but that's not quite what this
debate is about I'd say.

I find overlays really useful for testing stuff before it gets into
portage - that's completely pointless if the overlay is secret. Also,
you are able to find potential future devs among the overlay users,
people who actually submit fixes etc. How are you going to get that if
noone knows about the overlay?


> We have a couple other users who use the overlay but they know what
> they're doing. We don't make the overlay that easy to use on purpose
> because we don't want inexperienced users using it. So apart from not
> advertising it, we don't keep digests in the repo.

Oh well, seems like you have a very specific use for this, probably not
what most users are interested in.

> I think the point is that these overlays should be a useful way of
> getting contributers more closely involved. However we should not
> encourage end users to use these overlays without thinking. For example
> using more than one at once seems like a really bad idea. Perhaps if we
> make them sufficiently hard to use then end users will not use them and
> we'll just get the contributers we want.

As said above, how are you going to get new contributors without people
that are actually using/testing that stuff?

-- 

jakub