Re: [gentoo-dev] Over-reliance of Gentoo projects on overlays

[Michael Orlitzky <michael@orlitzky.com>]

On 06/13/2013 12:56 AM, Alexander V Vershilov wrote:
>> The main reason it isn't is because nobody wants to use CVS. For
>> good
examples, see sunrise or
>> gentoo-haskell.
> 
> As a part of gentoo-haskell team, I'd like to say that CVS issue is 
> not strongest one, there are much more meaningful reasons for having
> much stuff in overlays at least for haskell.
> 
> IMHO:
> 
> The main point that haskell ecosystem is very breaky and only latest 
> version is supported, so the safest path is to be on a bleeding edge
> and patch inconsistent applications. So if one package gets updated
> then commonly we need to fix its reversed deps, if it were in tree
> than we would be involved into stabilization process and in the end
> will delay updating deps, and the difficulty of tracking all version
> variant will be much higher than no, at the end the quality of the
> packages in tree will fall. Really we can _guarantee_ that everything
> work in overlay but there is either no technical or bureaucracy
> reasons that prevent from fixing as soon as possible.
> 
> All above is applicable because in overlay we work on programmers
> libraries, with enduser
> applications (that are synchronized with portage tree) situation is
> slightly different.
>

To be clear, I meant that sunrise and gentoo-haskell were good examples
of overlays where e.g. subversion and git have made user contributions
much easier.

I don't agree that up-to-date libraries need to be in an overlay -- why
not ~arch or package.mask instead, and leave the platform to stable? --
but I benefit greatly from (and appreciate) the fact that you guys are
able to merge my pull requests into the overlay quickly so I can't
complain too much.