Re: [gentoo-dev] Official overlay support

[Paul de Vrieze]

On Thursday 23 March 2006 15:54, Eric Edgar wrote:
> I personally think this is a bad idea.  I can understand and support
> links to different overlay repositories, however I do not think that
> gentoo should host or support overlays on its own infrastructure.  For
> one thing supporting overlays on our infrastructure looks like we are
> supporting broken ebuilds.  This will also lead to more confusion with
> users who find these official overlays and then the overlays conflict
> with each other and cause problems that leads to comments like well
> gentoo should just know how to fix it and make it all work.  I also
> think that this overlay structure will not provide incentives for people
> to commit to the main tree.  They will get their ebuild in an overlay
> and its hosted on gentoo and distributed to the mirrors.  At that point
> its easy for them to continue to use the overlay.  Over time the overlay
> will diverge more and more from other overlays and even the main tree.

I think that overlays are too useful to not provide. Let me give an example. 
Currently my office workstation is hosting an overlay for ebuilds for 
vmware-server. This overlay came about because I wanted to keep it in an 
overlay/svn repos for myself. This is much preferable than downloading 10+ 
files from a bugzilla bugreport. As I thought others might appreciate it, I 
posted the link at the bug. Another dev requested that the contributor 
(trainee dev actually) get access. I saw no problem with that, so agreed. 
This setup works quite satisfactory. As the repos is special purpose, I have 
no doubt that the ebuilds will finally end up in the tree. Currently the 
software and ebuilds are only beta though so would have to be hard masked.

From this experience I agree with Stuart that it can create a good bridge 
between gentoo and "trusted users".

Paul

-- 
Paul de Vrieze
Gentoo Developer
Mail: pauldv@g.o
Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net