On Tuesday 22 April 2003 15:59, Frantz Dhin wrote:
> I feel that this is one of the
> reasons that we have an unstable branch, or maybe we could make a new
> keyword? x86 for stable, ~x86 for unstable, and ^x86 for lunatic? :) 

Just a quick note (without addressing your main point). ~arch is _not_ 
"unstable". It is not supposed to be unstable in the literal meaning of the 
word. It is 'testing', or 'works for me'. Developers can _not_ commit things, 
or leave things, unmasked in ~x86 that have known issues, or that are 
alpha-quality releases from upstream. (This doesn't apply directly to what 
you were saying, I just don't like to see it called unstable...)

----

Now to the main issue. The main reason why submitted ebuilds aren't getting 
into portage easily and quckly is not the need for testing before committing. 
It is that the person committing that ebuild, or _some_ other developer, will 
have to maintain it later on. That means being responsible for problems with 
it (and there are always some problems eventually), and processing future 
updates/bureports/feature requests etc.

These require that developer to be well acquianted with the ebuild. If the app 
is nontrivial, and there are several such under this developer's care, it can 
get quite troublesome. And remember this developer generally does not use 
these apps himself - or he would have added an ebuild without waiting for a 
user submission.

The points you and other people make in this thread are known and acknowledged 
by us. We are busily working towards a setup that solves these problems. The 
first step is the upcoming (I hope) reorganization of the gentoo internal 
development model so that every ebuild has explicit maintainer(s). The second 
will facilitate quick acceptance of user-submitted ebuilds in some way - 
probably drawing upon the submitters in one way or another.

The implementation of this second step depends (imo) on the first, which is 
being busily discussed for the past week. Please give us time to put it into 
place before we move into the second phase, which is when user opinions/ideas 
will be heard properly.

-- 
Dan Armak
Gentoo Linux developer (KDE)
Matan, Israel
Public GPG key: http://cvs.gentoo.org/~danarmak/danarmak-gpg-public.key