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hasufell posted on Fri, 25 Jul 2014 15:44:47 +0000 as excerpted: |
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> Sounds like that would be an interesting gentoo project. But afais PMS |
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> doesn't really specify how binary packages should look like, so we will |
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> hit incompatibility problems there as well. |
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AFAIK binpkgs are purely an individual PM feature, considered outside the |
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domain of PMS. |
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Unless things have changed, paludis doesn't support them at least in |
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portage form and there's active antipathy toward adding that (altho I |
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believe there was discussion of adding rpm support at one point). |
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I don't know whether pkgcore supports them or not, tho if it does, I |
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suspect its support is close to the portage-native form. But while I |
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believe someone's working on pkgcore again now, until it gets EAPI-5 |
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support it's pretty much out of the picture anyway. |
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Gentoo did at one point do binpkg ISO-images, but I've not seen or heard |
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anything of that in years, and of course while they did form a convenient |
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quick-install foundation, they were quickly outdated, and there was no |
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gentoo-only mechanism to continue with binpkgs -- you did your quick- |
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install from binpkg, optionally changed any USE flags you wanted and |
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rebuilt using --newuse, and continued with conventional gentoo build-from- |
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source after that. |
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Meanwhile, it's worth noting that a mostly from-sources distro such as |
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gentoo has the luxury of bypassing many of the legal issues involved with |
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binary distribution. Among other things there's the patent issues that |
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don't normally apply (at least in the US) to source distribution due to |
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freedom-of-speech-overrides, and the gpl source provision (including our |
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patches) obligations as well. |
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Partially for that reason, gentoo as a distribution has in the past |
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chosen to deemphasize binaries and leave most of the binary distribution |
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angle to the gentoo-based distros. That lets us continue focusing on |
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what we do best, while leaving the gentoo-based distros a bit more space |
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to work on what they can do better. While there'd certainly be some |
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convenience to a binaries server, is it really going to be worth the |
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cost, in legal hassle, in blurring our sources focus, and in killing that |
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exclusive niche for our downstream distros? |
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Meanwhile, a question for the infra and foundation folks: A quick look |
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at the the download links and mirrors says that we're still distributing |
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10.1 images for at least x86 and amd64. Based on the file-dates on the |
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mirrors, that was 2009, and I don't see corresponding links to sources, |
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which means at least for the gplv2 binaries on those images, we're |
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obligated to provide sources, including our patches, until 2017 (three |
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years from now) and counting. While the ebuilds and tarballs aren't |
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likely to be a huge issue, are we sure we have those patches archived and |
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will until three years after we quit distributing those binaries, such |
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that we can provide them on-demand? If not, those images need to come |
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down. |
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|
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-- |
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Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. |
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"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- |
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and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman |
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