Re: [gentoo-dev] Official overlay support

[Duncan Coutts <dcoutts@gentoo.org>]

On Wed, 2006-03-22 at 09:03 -0800, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> Stuart Herbert wrote:
> > I've been very happy with using svn+trac overlays to bridge this gap. 
> > They provide a sandbox for contributions to be shared and evaluated. 
> > They provide a place where I've been able to give commit access to
> > non-devs, so that they can learn the ropes w/out threatening the
> > Portage tree proper.  They provide a place where people who just want
> > to write docs for a single package can contribute.
> > 
> > Overlays create a sense of participation that's lacking with Bugzilla
> > patch submissions.  Backed up with regular communication (I recommend
> > not recruiting anyone who won't spend time in the IRC channels, but
> > that's a personal preference), they help us get things done quicker.
> > 
> > The downside with overlays at the moment is that they're scattered
> > around the net, and if you don't know where to look they can be very
> > hard to find.  I've been talking with infra about providing
> > overlays.g.o as a central hosting service for herd and individual
> > developer overlays.  Infra have been very supportive of the idea.  I
> > just need to free up some time to get the service launched.
> 
> This definitely sounds like a fun idea. It would be even cooler if we
> were using a distributed SCM on both ends that allowed for easy merging.

We do this within the Haskell herd and with a small handful of outside
contributers. We use darcs for our distributed SCM which makes the
merging trivial.

If works like so:
We keep our testing ebuilds in a shared overlay managed with darcs.
The Haskell herd members have write access. Trusted external
contributers have write access to the overlay too (mostly people who are
in the middle of the recruitment process). The existing devs are of
course responsible for actually committing anything to portage cvs.
Other contributers have read only access but they can "darcs send" us
patches. These do not automatically get applied (as with our trusted
contributers) but get emailed to us and any Haskell herd dev can review
and apply patches sent in this manner quite easily.

We have found that this system works rather well. It allows our testers
and helpers to participate in writing ebuilds which has made the
recruitment process smoother. It provides an intermediate phase in the
recruitment process where they can participate in the herd's work
without any danger of messing up portage cvs. Bugzilla is ok for
submitting whole new ebuilds but it's got far too large an overhead for
one line patches. Using darcs gives us a very low overhead.

We also use the shared overlay as a testing zone for our herd's ebuilds.
Our modus-operandi is to commit changes in ebuilds to the overlay, get
peer review from other herd members and then commit to portage when we
are satisfied. Of course this also makes it easy for our testers to keep
up with the latest versions of ebuilds. With the combination of darcs
and irc, we can get very quick turnaround on our testers finding bugs to
fixing them and getting those changes back to our testers.

-- 
Duncan Coutts : Gentoo Developer (Haskell herd team lead)
email         : dcoutts at gentoo dot org

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