Re: Facilitating user contributed ebuilds (Was: [gentoo-dev] The future of the Sunrise project)

[Daniel Campbell]

On 06/13/2016 11:24 PM, Alexander Berntsen wrote:
> In addition to what Peter Stuge (correctly) identifies as needing to
> change, there also needs to be a modularisation of Gentoo-curated
> package repositories.
>
What sort of modularization are you talking about? Would we suggest
something like GNOME, KDE, XFCE, Mate, Cinnamon, et al getting their own
overlays? dev-lang/foo getting its own overlay, etc?

To some degree, that will simplify some people's trees and quicken
emerge, but then it just pushes maintainance to a part that most users
don't really mess with much (repos.conf)

You can achieve mostly the same end via your own git repo at /usr/local/
and pulling overlays in via either layman or git submodules, for
overlays that aren't already in layman.

zugaina and layman are great tools that could use a bit more polish, and
could be either adopted or assisted as an official part of the handbook.

The issue here is similar to the issue Ubuntu and Debian face with PPAs.
There's no guarantee on their quality, and if an overlay becomes popular
then there may be pressure put on the Gentoo tree to adopt whatever the
popular overlay has. This could be detrimental *or* beneficial,
depending on what the changes are.

tldr modularization sounds good on paper but I don't see it being
beneficial in the long run. I would be happy with the requirements to
get into layman being somewhat relaxed and/or halfway automated so users
can host anywhere they want, get listed in layman as "not vetted" but
still available, and then some sort of process or mechanism to go from
"unvetted" to "vetted", and if they're lucky, "official". It would
require less shuffling of resources, as well.
-- 
Daniel Campbell - Gentoo Developer
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