Re: [gentoo-project] My manifesto for 2015/2016

[Daniel Campbell (zlg)]

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On 07/11/2015 09:16 AM, William Hubbs wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 11, 2015 at 01:43:06AM -0700, Daniel Campbell (zlg)
> wrote:
>> On 07/10/2015 09:40 AM, William Hubbs wrote:
>>>
>>> I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "Gentoo's stack" -- can
>>> you elaborate a little more on this?
>>
>> Sure. By "the Gentoo stack", I'm talking primarily about the
>> software stack -- kernel, init, early userland, and to a lesser
>> extent, @system - -- that Gentoo systems generally all have in
>> common, that won't change without good reason. In effect, I'm
>> asking if you favor the current situation where people have a
>> pretty minimal, workable base that will bend to their needs (be
>> they systemd, openrc, some other init; udev, eudev, mdev, vdev,
>> etc), or if you'd rather see a base that is treated as mostly
>> immutable like many other distros are going in the direction of
>> (or have already settled on).
>
> I'm fine with a minimal @system set and allowing users to build
> their systems on top of that. In fact, the movement has been
> toward removing more things from the @system set at some point.

Awesome, that sounds good. Minimizing @system is a good way to keep
people using it when they want to customize their own system or
distro, and saves them the trouble of having to learn what Gentoo did
when crafting said package set. :)

>
>> I think a big part of why we use Gentoo is its flexibility and
>> insistence on *not* forcing decisions on users or developers, so
>> I wanted a little clarification on that in contrast to the
>> "keeping up with change" part of your manifesto, which I think I
>> agree with in spirit but would rather not see us become a distro
>> that just follows, but instead innovates in our own way while
>> still shipping mostly vanilla packages.
>
> I'm not saying anything against innovation or flexability; in my
> experience, Gentoo is the most flexable Linux distro out there,
> and I want to keep it that way.
>
> When I was brought on board in Gentoo, the idea about patches was
> that they are waiting to be pushed upstream. I think unless there
> is a very good technical reason for the patch, we should avoid
> custom patches we do not intend to push upstream.

+1

>
> If a patch is rejected by upstream, we should dialog with them to
> find out why it was rejected and clean it up on our side. If we are
> patching software it should be so that everyone can benefit, not
> just Gentoo.
>
> Being innovative doesn't mean we keep supporting legasy software
> when there is new software that is clearly compatible with it and
> legasy upstream has told everyone to switch to the new software.
> This was the exact debate that was going on for a while when kmod
> hit the tree. Some were saying that since Gentoo is about choice
> we should keep m-i-t in the tree and let people use it even though
> m-i-t upstream made it very clear that it was dead and we should
> move to kmod going forward.
>
> I realize that a lot of this is on a case-by-case basis, but
> sometimes I feel that vocal minorities use the "gentoo is about
> choice" mantra to try to force custom patches on our maintainers
> or force them to maintain old dead software or keep legasy
> practices working just for the sake of it.
>
> William
>

Okay, thanks for clarifying. Your stance seems to balance the
pragmatism (dealing with upstream and respecting their direction)
while continuing to follow our principles wrt flexibility. I agree
that there's not much reason to keep an old or deprecated package
unless it's still pretty stable and doesn't require much (if any)
maintainer time. Nethack's development is pretty slow, but it's pretty
stable so imo I think we're right to keep it in tree.

Thanks again for clarifying.
- -- 
Daniel Campbell - Gentoo Developer
OpenPGP Key: 0x1EA055D6 @ hkp://keys.gnupg.net
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