Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Project Sunrise thread -- a try of clarification

[Carsten Lohrke]

On Friday 09 June 2006 14:04, Stefan Schweizer wrote:
> Please, do not assume our users being stupid. They know that they are using
> an ebuild from the sunrise overlay with zero support. They deliberately
> typed

You have said stupid, not me. Some won't care enough, I'm quite sure about 
that. We had such invalid bug reports occasionally in the past and I expect 
this to happen more often, the easier and more common dealing with overlays 
becomes. Regarding "zero support": Making this abslutely clear is what I miss 
looking at overlays.g.o.

> "svn co http://overlays.gentoo.org/svn/proj/sunrise/category/application"
> "emerge application"
>
> And also there are only applications from maintainer-wanted or
> maintainer-needed allowed in the overlay. Because packages are not supposed
> to overwrite files from other ebuilds it is unlikely that they can cause
> any damage to applications that have not been directly installed from the
> overlay.

maintainer-needed is imho not acceptable at all, as any dev trying to clean up 
bugs, won't know if a bug report comes from a user of the main tree ebuild or  
from your overlay.

> > Also some warning that an overlay may
> > break the tree or fubar the users system
>
> That is not the intention of the overlay.

If it were intended, it would be malicious. Even if not intended, it doesn't 
mean tree breakages won't happen. Some dev may change an eclass, without 
taking overlay ebuilds into account (and he doesn't have to), but the change 
may break all ebuilds inheriting the eclass in an overlay, leaving all the 
users of the overlay with a broken tree. And to make that clear: Eclasses in 
overlays are only "sort of" acceptable, when the same team handles the eclass 
in the the main tree, as eclasses in overlays hide the main tree eclasses.


Carsten