Re: [gentoo-dev] The state and future of the OpenRC project

[Andrew Savchenko]

Hello,

On Mon, 09 Jun 2014 21:45:26 +0000 hasufell wrote:
> Thomas Kahle:
> > then they stay in the overlay
> > because people feel it is not worth the effort to fix the QA
> > issues which in turn would be necessary before moving them to the
> > main tree.
> >
>
> Probably because no one mentored them on how to fix these QA issues.
> Otherwise... if that's attitude, then that's just sad and has to be
> fixed by those who run that overlay (review, contribution guidelines).
>
> And I still think that the top 1 reason people run an overlay is because
> it's easier than contributing directly.
> A lot of overlay maintainers I tried to convince on getting more
> involved even said that.

As for my own overlay, most of packages there are just either
bugfixes already in bugzilla and pending there (often for years) or
extra packages nobody cares to add despite bugs. I don't want to
blame anyone, project is understuffed and people are overburdened.
But even for those became Gentoo devs it is not so easy to fix
other people's packages due to quite strict and complicated rules
about touching other people's stuff.

So the problem is not in overlays being easier, but in overlays
being often the only way to have required or fixed packages.

Another issue is that CVS is outdated if not retarded compared to
Git. CVS was great 15 years ago, but today Git is far more
productive for distributed collaborative development. Probably the
most terrible issues are how CVS manages directories, renames; and
branches support is really weird.

I don't know why CVS is still used for Gentoo main repository,
probably some infrastructure elements depends deeply on its
internals, because I see of no other reason why Git is still not
used despite efforts ongoing for last several years.

Best regards,
Andrew Savchenko