Re: [gentoo-dev] Portage QOS

[Alec Warner <antarus@gentoo.org>]

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On Wed, Jan 8, 2014 at 11:24 PM, LTHR <lanthruster@gmail.com> wrote:

>  Hi All,
>
>
I want to start off by discussing your premise, before embarking on the
overall goals.

You wrote:
"I'm with Gentoo for many years. For various reasons many techs were not
implemented and now Gentoo is in a kind of stagnation. But we can give
Gentoo a new birth with relatively little efforts and bring the distro to
the whole new level. "

I don't actually believe your premise of stagnation. But I can put aside my
disagreement for now. Lets talk about how the overall goal of 'bringing the
distro to a whole new level' and how 'Portage QoS' will help us get there.
I don't think you covered these points well in your post (I will talk about
the goals more below...)


> What do you think about implementing this:
>
> http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?p=7477494
>
I've system design in my head and could write it down with the
> implementation details.
> Then may be we could all review it and get to something we all agree upon
> then I could
> try getting a team and implement it.
>

Later in your post you wrote about the goals for Porage QoS.

Time we spare time for everyone - users, developers, maintainers.
Quality in 3-5 years we improve GENTOO in a way it will be in top10
distros, the users will be happy
Automatization no time to waste to improve Gentoo for the community,
everyone with GENTOO is part of GENTOO working for GENTOO
Bug Tracking no more we spare resources deployed in the bug tracking
system. It will exist. But's it's will be extended with robotic help from
Portage QOS
Knowledge we will know exactly who, how in what way GENTOO is used and we
will create a system for USERS not vice-versa
Order we will know exactly where to go next and what to do next what focus
on next
Integrity all GENTOO users will be able to participate in project. No
matter what experience they have. We will utilize help of a great number of
supporters.

Time: Portage QoS will save everyone time. I can actually believe this in
an ideal world where developers built automation around a system like
Portage QoS. Ironically I think tool development for *developers* is an
area that we are terrible at. Perhaps Portage QoS will have an awesome
easy-to-use API that makes tool writing a breeze, I don't really know. I
don't think blaming the portage API is necessarily the key to 'all our
tools are terrible' though.

Quality: Portage QoS will improve 'quality'. Again though, we don't really
measure quality in any quantitative way. If we switch to automated
reporting of failures, quality will actually go down, if we count quality
as 'reports of problems' because now reports are automated, rather than
manual. I think the big fear here is that many teams are already
understaffed and the automated system will quickly drown them. I imagine
Portage QoS could solve the 'drowning' problem, but i haven't see many
systems handle it well.

Bug tracking: Spend less resources on bug tracking. I think there is a lot
of missed opportunity for bugs automation. The sad fact is that infra is
terrible in areas like this, because the bug system is very opaque for
non-infra folks and the infra folks involved are not interested / don't
have time to implement the automation. So I will nominally agree here (even
if the automation isn't necessarily Portage QoS;e.g. we have discussed
automated bug assignment for *years*)

Knowledge: So I think in general I agree, insofar as more information can
be helpful in making decisions. I think you should take note that there are
at least 4-5 'gentoo stats' projects that have been tried and my
understanding is that none of them are in operation today.

Future Planning (you wrote: Order): I think this segment sort of
illustrates a misunderstanding of the Gentoo project as it is today. I
don't think developers are necessarily 'confused at how Gentoo is used' or
'do not know what to work on next.' I think developers work on whatever
they find interesting (that is what I do anyway ;p)

Back to the premise of bringing the distro to a whole new level. Some of
the items above I think have merits on their own, but they still don't
guide me to your ultimate goal. You outlined some of what I presume to be
defects in Gentoo today.

Package blocks that portage does not resolve automatically
Slot conflicts that portage does not resolve automatically
Compile failures
...What else?

So part of the Portage QoS system is that users will submit their failures
and Portage QoS will serve as a knowledge base of known issues. To me, that
is still a pretty bad User Experience. Can't we just get portage to handle
these issues transparently, as per
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-977936.html

Just a brief question - does anyone know how many ebuilds are assembled
> world
> wide each second?
>

I bet you more apks are installed per second ;)

-A


>
>
> *--  Best regards,  LTHR                          *
> mailto:lanthruster@gmail.com <lanthruster@gmail.com>
>

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