On Thu, 2006-03-23 at 14:41 +0000, Stuart Herbert wrote: > Hi Chris, > > On 3/23/06, Chris Gianelloni wrote: > > If some random developer goes out there and creates his own fork of > > catalyst in his overlay, I sure don't want to receive a *single* bug on > > it. Ever. > > Your nightmare scenario seems unavoidable. Enabling per-overlay bug > tracking doesn't stop users posting bugs in bugzilla. It just causes > confusion for users, because they're not sure where to go. Normally, > it's not a problem - because the overlay contributors are normally the > owners of the real package. No, it does not stop them, but it sure will curb the number of users posting their bugs to the wrong place. Remember that only more advanced users are the ones using overlays. We won't have Joe Sixpack using an overlay. Instead it'll be Bob Developer-to-be. How is that confusing? I went to http://overlays.gentoo.org/catalyst-ng and saw the overlay. I also saw the link the the bug tracker. > A hostile fork of Catalyst is very much a special case. No. It isn't. Look in many developer overlays and you'll see packages that they have made that work how *they* want them to, even if it is *very* different from what is in the tree. This is the case for packages that are not maintained by them, too. Any ebuild that is done by someone that isn't the maintainer is a fork. There's nothing "hostile" about it. > What we could do is say that overlays are for package trees only; ie > they are not general-purpose repositories for holding source trees. > That would ensure that your nightmare scenario is even less likely to > happen, and that if it does, it's through no fault of the overlays > project :) It has nothing to do with a source tree. I could store the source tree, and tarball, anywhere. The ebuilds to use these tarballs would be just as dangerous. I see no problem with overlays in concept, such as the php overlay that is very successful. The main reason that it is successful is because the same people that maintain php maintain the overlay. Yes, there are other contributors, but the maintainers of the overlay are still the developers. I see no problem with providing these sorts of overlays to bridge the gap between contributing users and developers. I *do* see a problem with simply allowing random overlays from any developer for anything. -- Chris Gianelloni Release Engineering - Strategic Lead x86 Architecture Team Games - Developer Gentoo Linux