Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoostats, SoC 2011

[Rich Freeman]

On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 7:45 AM, Thomas Kahle <tomka@g.o> wrote:
> Sorry, but NO.  If you want you can make a big noise message that asks
> users to install the cron-job but opt-out is not an option here.

Well, that's up to the Council/Trustees ultimately, but opinions (and
better still reasoning) are welcome since both would no-doubt want to
reflect the will of the community (and whatever is legal in the
jurisdictions that matter).

One option that many distros employ is a forced opt-in/out decision.
During the install process they simply ask the user, and they have to
hit either yes or no to continue.  The reason most people don't opt-in
is that they don't think about it, and this forces the issue.

The Gentoo analogue would be to put something in make.conf or whatever
that must be set one way or another.  Maybe have an opt-in use flag
and an opt-out use flag and if you don't set either emerge just dies
with a notice or something.  No doubt somebody could come up with a
more elegant solution.

Maybe another line of discussion that could inform the debate is what
the value of this information is?  For a company, knowing what
packages are popular helps them to allocate resources.  Gentoo is a
volunteer effort and devs allocate their effort based on personal
preference, though perhaps some would care about package popularity to
an extent.  So, we might not benefit to the same degree from this kind
of information, since we can't crack the whip and force people to fix
some broken package that is popular.

Rich