Re: [gentoo-dev] State of Developement

[Dominik Westner <westner@logicunited.com>]

Well, first let me say that Gentoo is the first Linux distribution I 
really like. It's not yet perfect but it's getting there.
It's also the first distribution I would like to get involved more.

I have submitted some ebuilds and most of the ended up in portage quite 
quickly. Some have been reworked a little bit, which I appreciate a 
lot, because you see how to make it better. About some (very few) I 
never heard back (e.g. Darwin Streaming Server). I don't know why, but 
maybe nobody cared about the packages.
I also submitted bug reports and got lots of feedback. So I am very 
happy about this, even if so far none of my suggestions made it into 
the system, which is ok, because I feel that the people are really busy 
with other things and for me it's easy to setup the system the way I 
like it.


On Montag, August 26, 2002, at 09:28 PM, Grant Goodyear wrote:

>> And they have to go through a specific set of privileged people.
>
> True, although to the best of my knowledge all distributions have
> a similar system.  I don't think it will ever make sense to
> provide CVS write access to all users; it's simply too easy to
> mess things up.  Goodness knows that our developers regularly
> manage to render Gentoo uninstallable, and they're trying very
> hard not to do that.  Our system isn't perfect, but I'm not sure
> what would be better.

One cool think, I would really like to see is a public read/write 
third-party portage tree (simillar the way PORTDIR_OVERLAY works now 
locally).
This would not be checked by default, but one could enable it. Once 
ebuilds stabilize they could be moved from there into the main portage 
tree.
This would take the burden from the core team to do QA and rework 
submitted ebuilds. And people submitting ebuilds would get much more 
feedback. And the maintainer would be the person, who submitted the 
ebuild not somebody from the core team ;-)

I guess we could do that right now by setting up a sf project and hack 
the portage tools. (or simply use PORTDIR_OVERLAY for this purpose).

>
>> Q: Can I help, can I help
>> A: Sure, you can take out the trash and scrub the toilets.
>
> Well, right now that's pretty much what the developers are doing,
> too.  Our biggest need for help right now is good bug reports and
> help with existing bugs.  The only major "development" that is
> ocurring right now is portage and some people starting to work on
> a sensible installer.  Everything else is really bug fixing of
> one sort or another.


Please, no installer ;-) The way of installing gentoo is so simple and 
straight forward, I could not imagine an easier install.

Dominik