Re: [gentoo-dev] Official overlay support

[Duncan Coutts <dcoutts@gentoo.org>]

On Thu, 2006-03-23 at 18:55 +0000, Chris Bainbridge wrote:
> On 23/03/06, Chris Gianelloni <wolf31o2@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > On Thu, 2006-03-23 at 16:40 +0000, Chris Bainbridge wrote:
> > > If the software a user wants is in an overlay, then the user will be
> > > forced to install the overlay.
> >
> > It shouldn't be in the overlay, is I think the point many are trying to
> > make.  If the software is good enough for any of our users, it should be
> > good enough for the tree.
> 
> I agree. I would ask, what are the advantages of overlays that
> developers find so compelling that they use them rather than the
> portage tree? Would it not be a better idea to find a way to bring
> those advantages to the tree, rather the proliferation of overlays we
> are seeing?

The advantages we see are:

We use it as a staging area for our herd's ebuilds. We can start with an
untested ebuild and between several team members and outside testers we
can iteratively test and refine the ebuild. This relies on a low latency
between committing changes and other devs and outside testers receiving
those changes. We have a lag of several seconds rather than 30 minutes
for the anoncvs. It means we get much higher QA before ebuilds actually
end up in portage because by the time they get there they have been
reviewed and tested by other team members and outside helpers (often
including testing on several arches).

If we did this in the cvs tree we'd need to keep the packages masked all
the time we were improving them (overhead). We'd need changelog entries
for every change (overhead). We wouldn't be able to share the
development and testing with our outside helpers (due to anoncvs lag).
And of course we wouldn't be able to grant out outside helpers write
access.

So the lower latency helps to run an AT-style system and the write
access allows for a safe intermediate stage in the recruitment process
between AT and dev status.

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

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