Re: [gentoo-dev] Official overlay support

[Duncan Coutts <dcoutts@gentoo.org>]

On Thu, 2006-03-23 at 13:55 -0500, Chris Gianelloni wrote:

> I'm sorry, but I am not OK with just standing by and watching us give
> complete access to do anything with no accountability.  If you are,
> perhaps you really need to rethink your commitment to our users and your
> fellow developers.

The way the Haskell team manages this is that we don't tell our end
users about our testing overlay. So we don't get bug reports from them.
We have three outside contributers with write access to the overlay
repo. They make changes in consultation with the team. So we're not
giving complete access without accountability.

We have a couple other users who use the overlay but they know what
they're doing. We don't make the overlay that easy to use on purpose
because we don't want inexperienced users using it. So apart from not
advertising it, we don't keep digests in the repo.

I think the point is that these overlays should be a useful way of
getting contributers more closely involved. However we should not
encourage end users to use these overlays without thinking. For example
using more than one at once seems like a really bad idea. Perhaps if we
make them sufficiently hard to use then end users will not use them and
we'll just get the contributers we want.

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

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