Re: [gentoo-project] Making Gentoo more fun

[Daniel Robbins]

On Sat, Feb 17, 2018 at 10:32 AM, Rich Freeman <rich0@g.o> wrote:
>
> I've also wondered if a more overlay-driven process might be
> beneficial, and certainly others like hasufel have been proponents of
> this mode.  I can think of some pros and cons:
>

I will address some of these concerns as best I can.

First, if chromium isn't shipping a stable upstream release, then the
chromium or "browser-kit" kit can select a version that has undergone some
testing and is known to be reliable, and make sure this ends up in the
"prime" kit. The latest dev releases can be added to the "dev" kit of
'browser-kit'.

In Funtoo, right now (since the 1.2 kits are not quite released,) we only
have a core-kit that is 1.0-prime. There is no other choice. But for xorg,
we have 1.17-prime and then developed 1.19-prime. We continue to backport
security fixes into 1.17-prime, but some time ago I flipped the switch to
make 1.19-prime the default kit. Funtoo users who did not hard-code the
xorg-kit to be 1.17-prime got updated to 1.19, as our ego sync tool
switched their default kit over to 1.19-prime. Likewise, we have python-kit
3.4-prime and 3.6-prime. And fully support users switching between the two
in a seamless fashion. The kits are kept in lock-step as they are generated
by a single script, at a single time and our "ego sync" tool ensures that
all kits are "aligned" -- this means that you can't use a python-kit
3.6-prime generated yesterday with a core-kit generated 30 days ago. This
ensures that a catpkg will only exist in one kit at a time, if we happen to
move a catpkg, and avoids chaos if the kits are not aligned. (This is easy
to implement -- I simply record all the SHA1's for the kits that are
generated together, and store these SHA1's in meta-repo -- our 'master kit'
that drives the whole process. You can switch kits, but you are locked to
the SHA1 that you can choose for each kit.)

You can see the metadata I have to drive the kits here:

https://github.com/funtoo/meta-repo/blob/master/metadata/kit-info.json
https://github.com/funtoo/meta-repo/blob/master/metadata/kit-sha1.json

I think this could be quite an exciting collaboration between Funtoo and
Gentoo. I know that there has been some interest in getting the
multi-profile system into Gentoo as well.

And yes, this effort started as finding the best way to take the Gentoo
tree and adapting it to our needs and ideal workflow. The upstream work in
Gentoo, in the past, has been both a blessing and a curse, because we would
suck in changes that would break things in our tree, thus making
angry_vincent, well, angry. But our new system provides the buffer we need.
No reason why Gentoo couldn't also use this system to provide a buffer.

Best,

Daniel