Re: [gentoo-dev] [OT] pkgcore bikeshed (was Portage team)

[Mike Frysinger <vapier@gentoo.org>]

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On Monday 13 January 2014 09:53:45 Tom Wijsman wrote:
> On Mon, 13 Jan 2014 16:15:37 +0700 "C. Bergström" wrote:
> > At the end of the day we have one codebase which is
> > "engineered" and another which has "evolved".
> 
> Too broad generalization, too much assumption; both can be held as
> meaning nothing compared to what "engineered" and "evolved" could
> really be, but as with doing that, it gets a subjective nature.
> 
> In other words, the lack of context makes this statement meaningless.

anyone who has spent serious time in the portage code base knows it sucks.  
i'm not blaming anyone -- it's no one's fault.  portage started as prototyped 
idea that has since had more and more stuff piled onto it over the years by 
each successive maintainer.  devs i've talked to agree that it sucks to work 
with.  it's why pkgcore was born in the first place.

i'd like to see portage & pkgcore merge, but it'd take quite a bit of work on 
the portage side to migrate step by step.  we generally haven't had leads who 
have enough time sorting out the existing bugs/feature requests to try and 
also restructure/reshape things.  maybe by trying to get new interest in the 
project means we can find some people willing to rip off some sizable chunks.  
the fact that the public API is pretty much non-existent is nice because it 
means we're free to change/break whatever we want.

note though that the "let's rewrite everything in a branch and then merge 
later" approach doesn't work.  it's been done a few times in portage land and 
aborted each time.  it's rare for this to work for other projects either.  
small steps are much easier to review/merge.
-mike

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