[gentoo-user] on overlays and contributing to gentoo

[hasufell]

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I sometimes have the feeling the number of people directly
contributing to gentoo is decreasing and the number of people with
their own overlays is increasing.

Q: "Why contribute? I have my own overlay."
A: That is bad. There are several reasons:
* most overlays don't get any reviews from any other person/dev and
hence the quality is usually a lot lower than in the official tree
(not necessarily because we are smarter, but because of more eyes)
* overlays decentralize packaging which is a very bad thing and can
cause so many problems that I cannot name them all here (most
importantly overlay maintainers have no access to the trees profiles/
folder, cannot limit breakage that happened and cannot coordinate any
delicate bumps of crucial system libs)
* some overlay maintainers overwrite system libraries with their own
versions, causing unnecessary bugs for users
* user experience does not improve if he has to add a whole overlay
for a single package
* most overlays don't do pgp signing or even have thin manifests
* many overlay maintainers do not even bother to communicate in bug
reports about ebuild requests, so developers might not even notice
that someone has already worked on an ebuild

There is probably more. In the end the important thing is that an
overlay is not a direct contribution to gentoo. Of course, direct
contribution requires more work and more patience, but will solve all
of the above problems.

Q: What is direct contribution?
A: There are many ways:
* file a bug report with an ebuild request giving useful information
about the package (I sometimes give up on working on an ebuild,
because I don't use the software and have little knowledge about what
users will expect from an ebuild)
* file a bug report with an ebuild proposal, preferably after getting
a review in #gentoo-dev-help or #gentoo-sunrise
* communicate to devs that you are interested in becoming a proxy
maintainer [1]
* contribute to sunrise [2] the official user overlay (yes, also an
overlay, but with very strict policy to ensure compatibility with the
tree); here you also get a review in #gentoo-sunrise and we have
mirrors on github and bitbucket to accept pull requests
* start bothering the gentoo herds/projects directly, either in their
IRC channel or in their official overlays (oh, an overlay again,
yes... but most of the time the work done there flows directly into
the tree with some delay); some are hosted on github etc
* become a dev [3]

Only do your own overlay if more than one of the contribution channels
failed. As an example: if you propose binary ebuilds for software that
is opensource, then devs will probably not like that.

It is also fine to have your own overlay, e.g. for testing or for
packages that are really alpha, but contributing directly is more
awesome and benefits more users.


- --
[1] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/qa/proxy-maintainers/index.xml
[2] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/sunrise/index.xml
[3]
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/devrel/handbook/handbook.xml?full=1#book_part1_chap2
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