Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: Alexander Berntsen <bernalex@g.o>
To: gentoo-dev@l.g.o
Subject: Facilitating user contributed ebuilds (Was: [gentoo-dev] The future of the Sunrise project)
Date: Wed, 08 Jun 2016 13:17:12
Message-Id: 57581AC9.2020607@gentoo.org
1 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
2 Hash: SHA512
3
4 Friends,
5
6 It would be wise of us to create a novel way of involving users from
7 the ashes of Sunrise.
8
9 Here is my suggestion: It would be fruitful to encourage every single
10 Gentoo user to have their own repository. And this repository should
11 be publicly available.
12
13 This way we can merge useful things from people, and they can submit
14 pull-requests if they have useful things that are not in the tree.
15 Before merging anything to the main tree, ebuilds should of course be
16 carefully reviewed. Users could also review each other's ebuilds to
17 ensure better quality ebuilds.
18
19 This could lead to a future where the Gentoo tree is largely
20 superseded. Every user would just have their own repository, where
21 they could pick and choose packages from other users. The Gentoo tree
22 would just focus on a high-quality repository of the basic/core things
23 that everybody needs. Gentoo devs would spend most of their time
24 maintaining curated small and useful repositories.
25
26
27 While there is some work to be done to facilitate my suggestion, it
28 should be a lot less work than Sunrise was. What we need short-term is
29 simply documentation where we encourage users to have their own
30 repositories that are available online. Next up would be setting
31 Portage up to expect a user repository from the get go. The initial
32 personal tree could be fork of the Gentoo tree with a remote 'gentoo'
33 that they can pull from (emerge could do this automatically). This
34 way, users who do not care at all, can just use Gentoo like they do
35 today.
36
37 The final step is the most difficult (but then again we might never
38 get so far). It is two-fold. First we make the core/base repository.
39 Then we identify important subsets that can be logically separated
40 into repositories, and do this.
41
42 Parallel to all this, we should work on tooling. It is unreasonable to
43 expect people to be git experts to be effective. The workflows for
44 managing user repositories doesn't need the full power of git anyway.
45 It would also be good to offer hosting insofar as possible to a set of
46 curated repositories we consider to be of high quality.
47
48
49 In the end, Gentoo might make a gigantic leap into the future with a
50 truly modular distribution. If anyone wants to look at distros that
51 get this more right than Gentoo, have a look at e.g. NixOS and Exherbo.
52
53 What are your thoughts?
54 - --
55 Alexander
56 bernalex@g.o
57 https://secure.plaimi.net/~alexander
58 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
59 Version: GnuPG v2
60
61 iQIcBAEBCgAGBQJXWBrFAAoJENQqWdRUGk8BzvQP/iTrs1SedU3xrLoWwYb5LDBv
62 JT2Com8GZX6BE2KlAoljeO+epZT5WPe8sd0DTDg7l/kgceHdHzKpv9lXcf8l2XyX
63 d/WNTwGkzXl4it9b8FuDBfOHnhVIAr2kF3xs8N2C/aJAFAG4MuoQFmBdx0FTybqw
64 ahJvVMzElhYe2Hv3NTpawluW5K7MF9HXmQfS1lHwNadklWtoOIXEoN2AAitdwdzH
65 dr5bzPMnoc6HN4a4QEB93zDYMoJaGcMPRisQfSm7xr3J3XxZzmpTSEs9dNrJ7GmY
66 2yFQfZFGZTg7Wf04HI2JTBBS02CfLv5HAt7Z6V1RJvtzRD3mtrMP+fl8tTn0YZCR
67 U8MarqRiaz1LIpZzkeNM+EHY4QkwIsYG3HHcQ+sCEaUf9H0812E0XFZXNwW3XhgJ
68 UygKlG9pXwCsCCjGCWkTh8ppot3u6WAHhXifPsQ3ef0yTMohS9w5oudcF2VpeZj0
69 V6l6Cv5KoxD1ZOUXq3GshLpxZL1yOSAEbzbtsUvMCj7xtWdF9gVR2+tYR++lCj4G
70 5o3AlNBXCGhy2KvH+kcXItwpV9VGP1UXgXGz4mA1H6XLp3B8rBqXyQeTZ22v3toz
71 nCthV6KxYdRhOqqh0/TThJryW47c8Xz3GDSDDU1XhSTzqbfpPpBpVjEakODGu7Jy
72 AwWFC9xoaV7iwnBbFq7F
73 =zXlj
74 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

Replies