[gentoo-dev] the vision for Gentoo

[gentoo-dev] the vision for Gentoo

[Daniel Robbins]

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On Sat, Jun 28, 2003 at 12:26:52AM -0400, Dylan Carlson wrote:
> OT, and my apologies if this has been covered elsewhere:   what is the 
> status of Gentoo becoming a non-profit org?

Instead of trying to give you a simple status update on becoming a
non-profit, I'm going to share my very personal thoughts and feelings with
you guys in regards to the non-profit effort, with the goal of creating
some kind of group vision for the future of Gentoo.

If this email sounds sappy or overly self-introspective to you, it is not
intended to be that way.  Also, I did drink a cup of coffee recently, so
please take this into consideration when reading this email.

I personally do not care at all, it makes no difference to me, whether we
are for-profit, non-profit, neither or both. Ask a child what they want to
be when they grow up -- do they ever reply "I would like to be employed by
an S corporation" or "I want to establish a charitable trust"?
In a similar way to how a child is not interested in these things, I am not
interested in these types of things. 

Gentoo Technologies, Inc. is C corporation because it cost only $100 to
incorporate, and took less than a week to set up, and was what my lawyer
told me to do. It was the easiest way that I could set up a legal entity.  I
could really care less if it is a C corp, S corp, LLC or 501(c)(3). Now, I
do understand and appreciate that many of you care very much about these
issues, and I want you to be happy. Because many of you care about these
issues, it's my obligation to also care about these issues.

But I am not *personally* interested in our legal tax status. 

This is what you should know about me.

I want to do cool things, create new technologies, be involved with good,
friendly, courteous people, be part of a professional, well-organized team,
and have the ability to collaborate and learn.  I want to ensure that the
people I'm working to also have these opportunities. And I would like my
work to somehow change the world for the better. I realize that this
paragraph sounds like a long list of cliches, or a Miss Universe pageant
speech, but I suppose most peoples' ideals sound like that when actually
written down.

I like free software very much because it is a means to an end -- I love to
learn, and I don't like school. I cherish the freedom to able to educate
myself. That is something that is impossible to do without access to source
code. I love free software because it gives me the power to learn on my own.
I am going to guess that many of you are very much like me in this way.

When I look at projects such as Portage and Gentoo/BSD (two random,
well-known examples,) they are more than just a bunch of code to me. They
represent a new way of doing things, a new vision for how things should be
done, whether that relates to package management or the concept of a "Linux"
distribution. I find that very exciting. I see meaning in the projects that
have been created.

This is what inspires me. The concept of "metadistribution," for example,
gives me a vision of how Linux distributions should function. Exploring and
implementing this vision is incredibly exciting.

I've shared all this gushy personal information to say this. We all have
things that engage our minds and inspire us. I want this project engage and
inspire everyone, and be a joy for everyone. If I knew that turning Gentoo
Technologies, Inc. into a 501(c)(3) will guarantee this, then I'll make it
happen. But I am not naive -- I know very well that 501(c)(3) status is not
a panacea and does not guarantee joy. I'm afraid that some people view
501(c)(3) status in this light, as some kind of nirvana to be reached at
all costs.

I am *not* against a 501(c)(3). As I said earlier, I do not care. What we
need to determine first (in my opinion) is:

1) What engages and inspires us?

2) How do we formulate this "excitement/spirit" into a collective vision for
Gentoo?

3) How do we best implement this vision?

If the best way to implement our vision includes getting 501(c)(3) status,
then we will do it. I think that what we need first is a vision for the
project, and that process begins with introspection and reflection about
what makes us tick and what we want to get out of all this.

Best Regards,

-- 
Daniel Robbins
Chief Architect, Gentoo Linux
http://www.gentoo.org

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Re: [gentoo-dev] the vision for Gentoo

[gerrynjr]

> 1) What engages and inspires us?
Well, I am similar to you in this respect, drobbins. I prefer to teach myself, 
to explore by myself, to break things, and then fix them.
Gentoo provides that environment to the greatest degree, and is thus why
I use it. I like working and engaging myself with people of many
different backgrounds and cultures, and Gentoo allows me to do this. 
However, I also feel that more user Input should be taken into
consideration when making critical decisions. (This email topic is a
great step toward this.) 

As I previously stated, I like breaking things. I used to be part of a
what Mandrake called "The Crash-testers."  It was a private list that
included people from around the world. Basically, we would test new
packages, new Ideas, as well as stress test existing ones. We became a
type of Quality Assurance Team, at least until our supervisor was let
off. 

I for one an interested in most alternative technical things. I'm
interested in security, PC architecture, alternative operating systems,
and new ideas. 

> 2) How do we formulate this "excitement/spirit" into a collective vision for
> Gentoo?

I feel it would be difficult to formulate a "collective" opinion until
we receive many more opinions on the matter, otherwise it isn't really a
collective spirit. I see Gentoo as quite possibly the future of Linux
meta-distributions, and the coming ability to choose a kernel, even if
it isn't Linux.. is a great thing. 

As for a straight out vision, it would be difficult to formulate one, as
gentoo's current one meets my expectation somewhat. 

> 3) How do we best implement this vision?

I can see how becoming a non-profit org may comfort many people, it
guarantees that their work (volunteer work, etc.) is preserved and 
not taken advantage of. It may provide some protections.  For the most
part, I could care less if it's a non-profit, but if becoming one makes
more people feel comfortable with helping out... that changes things. 

--Gerry Normandin


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[gentoo-dev] private mailing lists? (was [Re: [gentoo-dev] the vision for Gentoo])

[Todd Berman]

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On Sat, 2003-06-28 at 10:17, gerrynjr wrote:
> As I previously stated, I like breaking things. I used to be part of a
> what Mandrake called "The Crash-testers."  It was a private list that
> included people from around the world. Basically, we would test new
> packages, new Ideas, as well as stress test existing ones. We became a
> type of Quality Assurance Team, at least until our supervisor was let
> off. 
Wait, Mandrake, another Linux distribution, has a private mailing list?

This is exactly what I was speaking about before, and I stand by it, I
bet all Linux distributions (actually, read: projects) have these.

--Todd

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Re: [gentoo-dev] the vision for Gentoo

[Michael Kohl]

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Some interesting discussions going on on this list lately...

On Sat, 28 Jun 2003 03:18:53 -0600
Daniel Robbins <drobbins@gentoo.org> wrote:

> 1) What engages and inspires us?

I found out about Gentoo over a year ago on OSNews, had a look a the
website and just thought: "This is it!". The thing I really find
inspiring about it is the desire to push the limits and not be yet
another Linux distribution. As recent developments show (Portage for OS
X, Gentoo/BSD, an ebuild for the mach kernel etc.), it's not even about
being a *Linux distribution* at all. For me, personally, Gentoo is an
*idea distribution* (does that really sound as pathetic as I think it
sounds?). This whole "feeling" around Gentoo made me want to contribute
*really* for the first time (ok, I do nothing except some GWN work and
throwing random ideas at -dev, but still...), as it seems like a good
"framework" of getting interesting things back from your contributions,
and often this are things you didn't even think of in the beginning.

> 2) How do we formulate this "excitement/spirit" into a collective
> vision for Gentoo?

Isn't the great thing about Gentoo that *it* adjusts to your vision,
instead of forcing *you* to adjust to it's? Honestly, the thing I expect
most from Gentoo is to keep all this excellent ideas coming in the
future! Even if I'd switch to another operating system (not likely to
happen anytime soon), I'd sure keep an eye on Gentoo, just for the fun
of all the nice thoughts popping up all the time.

> 3) How do we best implement this vision?

I like the recent developments in this regard, namely the proposal for
the new managment structure and GLEPs (which as a formal way of
proposing new features for the distribution can do great things for
user-dev interaction). *But* another thing I'd like to see (which may
contradict some of my aforementioned thoughts), is Gentoo being a little
less of a moving target: clear definitions of goals for a certain
release, an easy to access roadmap (both should be taken care of by the
new managment structure), clear responsibility for package
maintainership (taken care of by herds I guess) and things like this.

About how to achieve this I'm not quite sure, although the BSD way of
-stable/-current seems to be a viable solution to some of my issues, it
somehow doesn't feel "gentooish" to me.

Regarding the for-profit/non-profit issue:
Coming from a Debian background I'd have nothing against seeing Gentoo
become non-profit, but I couldn't really blame anybody for the (IMHO
justified) desire to get some food for his work. Guess that's a tough
one, and maybe will take some time before a consensus can be reached...

Ok, it's already kinda late in my timezone, and I seem to write quite a
lot but say little with it, so maybe it's time to go to bed.

Michael

-- 
www.cargal.org 
GnuPG-key-ID: 0x90CA09E3
Jabber-ID: citizen428 [at] cargal [dot] org
Registered Linux User #278726

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[gentoo-dev] The problem of stable/current. Was: Re: [gentoo-dev] the vision for Gentoo

[James Yonan]

> > 3) How do we best implement this vision?
> 
> I like the recent developments in this regard, namely the proposal for
> the new managment structure and GLEPs (which as a formal way of
> proposing new features for the distribution can do great things for
> user-dev interaction). *But* another thing I'd like to see (which may
> contradict some of my aforementioned thoughts), is Gentoo being a little
> less of a moving target: clear definitions of goals for a certain
> release, an easy to access roadmap (both should be taken care of by the
> new managment structure), clear responsibility for package
> maintainership (taken care of by herds I guess) and things like this.
> 
> About how to achieve this I'm not quite sure, although the BSD way of
> -stable/-current seems to be a viable solution to some of my issues, it
> somehow doesn't feel "gentooish" to me.

Just to throw out an idea on creating a generalization to stable/current (I'm
new to Gentoo, so I'm not sure how much of this has already been done, or to
what extent these ideas have already been made concrete in the portage concept).

Why not create a notion of a distribution "checkpoint"?

A checkpoint is a file that contains all information necessary to build a
particular gentoo distribution as it existed at some point in time, similar to
the idea of a cvs tag, or saving the game before you do something that's
likely to get you killed :)  Taking the idea further, a checkpoint file could
be created as a snapshot of a distribution as it exists on a given machine, or
it could be edited by a distribution maintainer to favor a more conservative
or more experimental build, or you could extract a checkpoint that represents
the gentoo portage tree cvs at a particular date and time.  When you emerge
gentoo on a particular machine, you could specify an optional checkpoint file,
or select from a list of checkpoint files which have known properties such as
Stable, Experimental, etc.  Additionally, anyone could publish their own
checkpoint file, and others could use it to build similar distributions for
themselves. For example, someone with 400 days of uptime on a heavily used
server would have a checkpoint file which would be potentially valuable for
others seeking a very solid distribution.

As far as the format of the checkpoint file is concerned, it would basically
be a patch against a known, benchmark snapshot of the gentoo portage tree
(expressed as a cvs tag), and would be presented in a way that would bring the
power of diff, patch, and cvs (+ some of the distributed repository concepts
that are coming out of bitkeeper) to bear on the problem of evolving,
mutating, and merging distributions.

There are other potential benefits to the checkpoint concept.  Security
updates could be released as patches to a distribution checkpoint, allowing
stable users to get the minimal upgrade needed to implement the security fix,
rather than forcing a total upgrade.

This could help do away with an either-or stable or experimental designation,
as there would be a set of published stable checkpoints, each with their own
empirical history to back up their claims to stability.

In a lot of respects, the current cvs organization of gentoo makes this a very
straightforward concept, as a checkpoint simply becomes a patch against a
particular known snapshot of the gentoo portage tree.  So in the same way that
people start with vanilla kernels and then add patches, so too could you start
with a known gentoo benchmark release and then patch the distribution with a
"distribution patch" to make something games-centric, embedded centric,
stability-centric, etc.

I tend to think of gentoo as being a kind of source code for defining
distributions, and I think this concept fits in very nicely with Gentoo's
meta-distribution character.  In fact, I suspect that diffing, patching, and
merging portage trees is something that is already commonly done with a
distribution such as gentoo.  My proposal would then be to make it more
accessible, and better integrated.  The goal would be to create the
documentation and infrastructure so that someone could type "emerge search
distributions" and get a list of different possible gentoo distributions.  The
implementation of this would require an expansion of the .ebuild file concept,
so that a distribution checkpoint could be represented as an ebuild.  In that
sense ebuilds would become nested, i.e. a whole portage tree could be
minimally encapsulated within one .ebuild file, where the portage tree would
be represented as some known benchmark tree + a patch delta.

Just some ideas...

James


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Re: [gentoo-dev] The problem of stable/current. Was: Re: [gentoo-dev] the vision for Gentoo

[Martin Schlemmer]

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On Sat, 2003-06-28 at 23:31, James Yonan wrote:

> Just to throw out an idea on creating a generalization to stable/current (I'm
> new to Gentoo, so I'm not sure how much of this has already been done, or to
> what extent these ideas have already been made concrete in the portage concept).
> 
> Why not create a notion of a distribution "checkpoint"?
> 
> A checkpoint is a file that contains all information necessary to build a
> particular gentoo distribution as it existed at some point in time, similar to
> the idea of a cvs tag, or saving the game before you do something that's
> likely to get you killed :)

Unfortunately a big problem with this, is that ebuild do not stick
around long enouth ... except of course if you do it your side.

IMHO, I do not see that we can do it with current implementation
of the portage tree, even if we do not cleanup stuff - as if we
do not, the tree is going to get *too* big.


-- 

Martin Schlemmer
Gentoo Linux Developer, Desktop/System Team Developer
Cape Town, South Africa



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Re: [gentoo-dev] the vision for Gentoo

[Svyatogor]

> 1) What engages and inspires us?
I think you formulated it quite right. Ability to learn and to do cool
things in technology, that's what links many people with free s/w in
general and with Gentoo in particular. I am one of those people. Talking
about other things which inspire me I think it is the sense of taking
part in something important. Now, when I can more or less see Gentoo
from inside, I'd it is growing from a Linux distro into a concept. Yes,
I think it is becoming a concept and furthermore it is coherent with the
ideas of open source.

I would to mention one more great thing about gentoo, it is it's amazing
community, both users and devs. I find both of them very friendly and
opened. Believe me, I have something to compare it with. Before I came
across gentoo (that was around a year ago), I was working with Mandrake
and was even trying to contribute something to them. There I was feeling
like breaking through a wall (or trying to get employed in a big
corporation, which is about the same thing). Their attitude to those
users who are not club members is topic of a different discussion.
However, I'll repeat myself, gentoo communities are very friendly, and I
find it an important part of the success.

> 
> 2) How do we formulate this "excitement/spirit" into a collective vision for
> Gentoo?
Hmm, I really don't think I am able to make any comments on this, just
moving on to the next part.

> 
> 3) How do we best implement this vision?
Here, I'd rather agree with what Gerry said. If it's gonna comfort many
people then, yes, it would be good to non-profit. Let alone the fact
that many people do not understand well these legal questions and what
different statuses mean for them as users or as developers. So I think
at least after the decision is made it would be nice to post some
clarifications on the legal status means/implies.

P.S. When I was talking about Mandrake I did not mean to insult anyone
at all. I just talked about my own experience in other community.

-- 
Let the Force be with us!
Sergey Kuleshov <svyatogor@gentoo.org>


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Re: [gentoo-dev] The problem of stable/current. Was: Re: [gentoo-dev] the vision for Gentoo

[James Yonan]

Martin Schlemmer <azarah@gentoo.org> said:

> On Sat, 2003-06-28 at 23:31, James Yonan wrote:
> 
> > Just to throw out an idea on creating a generalization to stable/current (I'm
> > new to Gentoo, so I'm not sure how much of this has already been done, or to
> > what extent these ideas have already been made concrete in the portage
concept).
> > 
> > Why not create a notion of a distribution "checkpoint"?
> > 
> > A checkpoint is a file that contains all information necessary to build a
> > particular gentoo distribution as it existed at some point in time, similar to
> > the idea of a cvs tag, or saving the game before you do something that's
> > likely to get you killed :)
> 
> Unfortunately a big problem with this, is that ebuild do not stick
> around long enouth ... except of course if you do it your side.
> 
> IMHO, I do not see that we can do it with current implementation
> of the portage tree, even if we do not cleanup stuff - as if we
> do not, the tree is going to get *too* big.

Well, the idea would be to manage the size by having a benchmark portage tree
and then representing a custom tree inside an .ebuild file by taking the
benchmark portage tree reference + one or more patch deltas.  The
"distribution ebuild" file would really not be large, as it would contain
little more than tags, references, and patches, just as standard ebuild files
exist today for packages.  Since cvs already manages repository size by
representing changes as deltas, I doubt a cvs explosion would be likely.  The
real win with cvs (or other versioning tools) is the way in which tags can be
locked to constant snapshots of the tree which are invariant over the lifetime
of the repository.  This constancy is important because it provides a solid
foundation against which patch deltas can be derived, and would therefore
allow a particular gentoo snapshot (as represented by a patch against a cvs
tag) to be accessible indefinitely, leveraging the versioning capability of
cvs to prevent explosions in size and complexity.

I really do believe that the holy grail of meta-distributions is to achieve
the representation of an entire distribution in a compact, textual form,
allowing the tools of open source development (diff, patch, cvs, etc.) to be
applied to the distribution tree itself, and allowing the distribution to
evolve along different lines of evolution, but having the tools to keep the
different versions in sync.

Take, for example, the linux kernel.  A quick glance at kernel.org shows a
whole bunch of kernels, 10 to be exact.  Many of them are simply someone's
personal selection of patches, appended with their initials.  But these 10
versions are not true forks, they are only alternative versions of the same
overall evolutionary progression.  It's really the power of the versioning
tools, i.e. cvs, bitkeeper, etc. that gives us the ability to fork and then
remerge, making the forks ephemeral rather than irreconcilable, and preserving
an overall singularity of evolution even within an environment where multiple,
distributed repositories exist.

My idea is simply to take the _concept_ of cvs, bitkeeper, and distributed
versioning repositories as it is used in linux kernel development, and apply
it to making a true meta-distribution of gentoo. To the extent that the
portage tree concept is really a kind of source code for developing
distributions, and the fact that distributed development tools like diff,
patch, and cvs are already quite mature, I believe that it's not such a big
leap from concept to implementation.

James


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Re: [gentoo-dev] the vision for Gentoo

[Jens Hoffrichter]

On Sun, Jun 29, 2003 at 01:24:04AM +0800, Michael Kohl wrote:

> About how to achieve this I'm not quite sure, although the BSD way of
> -stable/-current seems to be a viable solution to some of my issues, it
> somehow doesn't feel "gentooish" to me.
I think this is really a great idea and a step in right direction. I have
migrated my personal work boxes not so long ago from Debian to Gentoo, 
because of the bleeding edge stuff which resides in portage an which is
really fast in it after a new release of a software is done (Really nice
to see, especially if you had to stay on XFree 4.0.x so long on Debian ;)) )
But I'm quite reluctant to put Gentoo anywhere on my servers, because
of the moving target Gentoo is, and after having my first 'bad' experience
with Gentoo (Done an emerge -u system some weeks ago, after that segfaulting
init, ls etc., and today having spent a whole day trying to fix the thing,
but XFree still won't compile correctly *sigh*), my opinion is that I have
made the right decision until now.

But a STABLE tree in portage CVS would make the decision to put Gentoo
on servers in production environments a lot more easier, when you know
that an emerge -u system doesn't break your whole server, but only merging
really necessary updates like security updates.

Nevertheless I hope the release frequency of such a STABLE tree would be
a lot higher than the release policy of Debian, which nearly forces you
to use the testing distribution if you do not want software which is 
more than a year 'old'.

Just my 2 cents.

Regards,
Jens

P.S.: I hope this mail is more than just "hot air" and my english is not
too bad, as I'm quite tired while writing this mail ;)
-- 
GPG: 1024D/CF884D50  F2E8 F7FC F823 6464 4E9D  EFAB 6EE9 8B9C CF88 4D50
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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  "Entweder sind wir die einzige intelligente Lebensform im Universum,
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     - Carl Sagan

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Re: [gentoo-dev] The problem of stable/current. Was: Re: [gentoo-dev] the vision for Gentoo

[Martin Schlemmer]

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On Sun, 2003-06-29 at 00:59, James Yonan wrote:
> Martin Schlemmer <azarah@gentoo.org> said:
> 
> > On Sat, 2003-06-28 at 23:31, James Yonan wrote:
> > 
> > > Just to throw out an idea on creating a generalization to stable/current (I'm
> > > new to Gentoo, so I'm not sure how much of this has already been done, or to
> > > what extent these ideas have already been made concrete in the portage
> concept).
> > > 
> > > Why not create a notion of a distribution "checkpoint"?
> > > 
> > > A checkpoint is a file that contains all information necessary to build a
> > > particular gentoo distribution as it existed at some point in time, similar to
> > > the idea of a cvs tag, or saving the game before you do something that's
> > > likely to get you killed :)
> > 
> > Unfortunately a big problem with this, is that ebuild do not stick
> > around long enouth ... except of course if you do it your side.
> > 
> > IMHO, I do not see that we can do it with current implementation
> > of the portage tree, even if we do not cleanup stuff - as if we
> > do not, the tree is going to get *too* big.
> 
> Well, the idea would be to manage the size by having a benchmark portage tree
> and then representing a custom tree inside an .ebuild file by taking the
> benchmark portage tree reference + one or more patch deltas.  The
> "distribution ebuild" file would really not be large, as it would contain
> little more than tags, references, and patches, just as standard ebuild files
> exist today for packages.  Since cvs already manages repository size by
> representing changes as deltas, I doubt a cvs explosion would be likely.  The
> real win with cvs (or other versioning tools) is the way in which tags can be
> locked to constant snapshots of the tree which are invariant over the lifetime
> of the repository.  This constancy is important because it provides a solid
> foundation against which patch deltas can be derived, and would therefore
> allow a particular gentoo snapshot (as represented by a patch against a cvs
> tag) to be accessible indefinitely, leveraging the versioning capability of
> cvs to prevent explosions in size and complexity.
> 

Well, sure, if we can do that from where it is migrated from cvs to the 
rsync servers.  We have gone into before, and it will make things too
complex in trying to have one ebuild file, but multiple versions.



-- 

Martin Schlemmer
Gentoo Linux Developer, Desktop/System Team Developer
Cape Town, South Africa



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Re: [gentoo-dev] The problem of stable/current. Was: Re: [gentoo-dev] the vision for Gentoo

[Michael Cummings]

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Not to be a nay sayer, because I like the idea of a stable tree, but one hitch is that in our current setup, we pull source from the source, but sometimes those source packages go away - hence the new ebuild. Not a universal, just pointing it out (happens in dev-perl/* for instance). Just sharing,

Mike

On Sat, 28 Jun 2003 22:59:52 -0000
"James Yonan" <jim@yonan.net> wrote:

> Martin Schlemmer <azarah@gentoo.org> said:
> 
> > On Sat, 2003-06-28 at 23:31, James Yonan wrote:
> > 
> > > Just to throw out an idea on creating a generalization to stable/current (I'm
> > > new to Gentoo, so I'm not sure how much of this has already been done, or to
> > > what extent these ideas have already been made concrete in the portage
> concept).
> > > 
> > > Why not create a notion of a distribution "checkpoint"?
> > > 
> > > A checkpoint is a file that contains all information necessary to build a
> > > particular gentoo distribution as it existed at some point in time, similar to
> > > the idea of a cvs tag, or saving the game before you do something that's
> > > likely to get you killed :)
> > 
> > Unfortunately a big problem with this, is that ebuild do not stick
> > around long enouth ... except of course if you do it your side.
> > 
> > IMHO, I do not see that we can do it with current implementation
> > of the portage tree, even if we do not cleanup stuff - as if we
> > do not, the tree is going to get *too* big.
> 
> Well, the idea would be to manage the size by having a benchmark portage tree
> and then representing a custom tree inside an .ebuild file by taking the
> benchmark portage tree reference + one or more patch deltas.  The
> "distribution ebuild" file would really not be large, as it would contain
> little more than tags, references, and patches, just as standard ebuild files
> exist today for packages.  Since cvs already manages repository size by
> representing changes as deltas, I doubt a cvs explosion would be likely.  The
> real win with cvs (or other versioning tools) is the way in which tags can be
> locked to constant snapshots of the tree which are invariant over the lifetime
> of the repository.  This constancy is important because it provides a solid
> foundation against which patch deltas can be derived, and would therefore
> allow a particular gentoo snapshot (as represented by a patch against a cvs
> tag) to be accessible indefinitely, leveraging the versioning capability of
> cvs to prevent explosions in size and complexity.
> 
> I really do believe that the holy grail of meta-distributions is to achieve
> the representation of an entire distribution in a compact, textual form,
> allowing the tools of open source development (diff, patch, cvs, etc.) to be
> applied to the distribution tree itself, and allowing the distribution to
> evolve along different lines of evolution, but having the tools to keep the
> different versions in sync.
> 
> Take, for example, the linux kernel.  A quick glance at kernel.org shows a
> whole bunch of kernels, 10 to be exact.  Many of them are simply someone's
> personal selection of patches, appended with their initials.  But these 10
> versions are not true forks, they are only alternative versions of the same
> overall evolutionary progression.  It's really the power of the versioning
> tools, i.e. cvs, bitkeeper, etc. that gives us the ability to fork and then
> remerge, making the forks ephemeral rather than irreconcilable, and preserving
> an overall singularity of evolution even within an environment where multiple,
> distributed repositories exist.
> 
> My idea is simply to take the _concept_ of cvs, bitkeeper, and distributed
> versioning repositories as it is used in linux kernel development, and apply
> it to making a true meta-distribution of gentoo. To the extent that the
> portage tree concept is really a kind of source code for developing
> distributions, and the fact that distributed development tools like diff,
> patch, and cvs are already quite mature, I believe that it's not such a big
> leap from concept to implementation.
> 
> James
> 
> 
> --
> gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list


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