Re: [gentoo-dev] DistroWatch and Gentoo packages: status quo and future

[Richard Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

Jesús Guerrero wrote:
> Yeah, devs for that as well.
> 

Yup - I think we're actually on the same page.  Ultimately quality 
matters more than quantity and everybody does what they can given the 
resources we have.

>> Right now it is at least a little painful to get set up with an overlay.
> No, it's a matter of using layman -a <whatever>

Sure, and that is fine if overlays are intended only as experimental 
development spaces.  However, some (not necessarily including yourself) 
advocate that it is perfectly fine that the portage tree gets stale 
since we have all those overlays.  That certainly is a possible approach 
to take, but to go that route overlays need to become more robust. 
Right now they're really not a replacement for /usr/portage.

> There's no policy. Just like unofficial repos for any other distro.
> We can't control that. It's outside Gentoo.

Exactly.  And, because it is outside of Gentoo - packages in overlays 
don't count when we consider how up-to-date Gentoo is.  If we want to 
say that package foo isn't stale because there are recent versions in 
some overlay, then Gentoo needs to take responsibility for the overlays. 
  That might be as simple as being a gatekeeper - auditing overlays and 
booting ones that drift out of control.

> I don't think we can do any more with the number of developers we
> have right now unless we start dumping blindingly and without any check
> every ebuild that we get across.
> 

Absolutely.  The whole logic behind going to an overlay-based approach 
is that it allows developers to leverage external help more effectively 
- a developer can essentially delegate a whole mini portage-tree to some 
other entity to manage, simply providing oversight and QA.  In theory 
you could even have official overlays - which would allow better 
delineation of responsibilities (you don't need to grant people commit 
access to everything - just their project's overlay).

Ultimately, as you argue, it doesn't make a difference if nobody is 
willing to step up and actually maintain ebuilds.

Personally, I like the overlay idea, but right now it just isn't 
necessary.  In theory proxy maintainers work almost as well, and we're 
not really making heavy use of this model right now.  If we had hundreds 
of users submitting high-quality ebuilds in bugzilla and simply couldn't 
find enough devs to commit them all, then a more overlay-based approach 
would help reduce the bottleneck of having a centralized group of 
committers.  Right now we probably have far more devs than proxy-devs, 
so the need to delegate the tree further really isn't there.