[gentoo-dev] Re: A heretical thought? Blessing project sunrise as an almost-fork.

[Peter]

On Tue, 13 Jun 2006 10:06:56 -0700, Donnie Berkholz wrote:

> Henrik Brix Andersen wrote:
>> As I've said all along - I do not have any problems with Project
>> Sunrise. I have a problem with it being an official project hosted on
>> *.gentoo.org, as I fear most users will think "hey, it's official, it's
>> hosted on *.gentoo.org - it can't be that bad". Judging from the few
>> users who have posted to the previous threads on this subject, my fear
>> seems to be reasonable.
>
> Do you also expect that once I'm able to move my overlay to overlays.g.o,
> it will become this amazing beautiful thing that never has any
> work-in-progress stuff in it that's incredibly broken? (I would love if
> that were the case.) The same goes for any other personal or project
> overlays there, as I doubt many users will distinguish between them.
>
> Thanks,
> Donnie

But, we're NOT just talking about borked and incomplete packages. We are
ALSO talking about good, normal, and useful packages which, for a variety
of reasons, just can't seem to make it to the main portage tree. This idea
that everything in sunrise is going to be uber-experimental, possibly bad,
and likely-to-break-your-machine, is overstating the case.

And, again, considering your user-community, a user MUST make a few
concrete action steps in order to open up [the Pandora's box that some
thing this is] Sunrise. No one will ever accidentally be able to download
a Sunrise hosted project without consciously choosing to do so.

As for where it is hosted, as a user. myop says, it should be on
.gentoo.org, and on .gentoo infra. Why? Because of the link to gentoo's
bugzilla. If there is going to be a relation between bugs on bz -> Sunrise
-> bz (and ultimately, maybe) -> main portage tree, then having o.g.o and
sunrise together makes a lot of sense. Otherwise, you end up confusing
matters even more.

While I realize there is a lot at stake, and probably some policy issues
and security issues that deserve discussion, I think that the degree of
doom some of you ascribe to this project is not worthy.

I think, should Sunrise get a green light, that it will turn out to be a
developer and prospective-developer playground and testing site largely
ignored by users. Any user who choose to use Sunrise will have a specific,
very specific need.

As an example, there is a kernel source build I've been playing with. I
know, from the kernel team, it will never, repeat NEVER, get onto the
portage tree. they want no part of it. However, the bug is widely
followed, and if Sunrise were to be a home to it, then these bug readers
would be able to continue to work on the project. Why should it just waste
away on bz? See bug # 103354 started by Scott Jones who did most of the
work on it. This kernel source is also tracked on the gentoo forums.

This kernel source will not cause Armageddon to arrive, cause smoke to
issue from your power supply, nor interfere with other ebuilds. 

I think it Sunrise belongs part of .gentoo.org, and it should be given a
probationary period, say 90 days, for review. I am sure tracking of
downloads, uploads, and problems can easily be done. I think portage can
also be reprogrammed to spit out warnings, even require a positive
acknowledgment, when requesting an overlay the first time. Something like:

YOU ARE REQUESTING AN OVERLAY EBUILD
There are inherent risks associated
with this action. Overlay ebuilds are
not official parts of the Gentoo main
tree, and as such, should be considered
experimental. Do you acknowledge this: (Yes).

If yes, then touch a file somewhere and the user won't be nagged again.

Am I being to simplistic or naive?

-- 
Peter


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