Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] SRC_URI behaviour

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Sat, Jun 15, 2013 at 11:43 AM, Luca Barbato <lu_zero@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On 06/15/2013 05:33 PM, Rich Freeman wrote:
>> On Sat, Jun 15, 2013 at 11:24 AM, Brian Dolbec <dolsen@gentoo.org> wrote:
>>> The other thing is that would put a mandatory system requirement on
>>> layman which many of the devs would be opposed to. But, there is an open
>>> bug calling for it to be merged with portage...
>>
>> Honestly, native support for overlays is something paludis gets right
>> - the main tree is just another tree and you prioritize them.
>
> Not sure it is a great idea in practice.

This is how virtually all other distros operate - they ship with a
list of repositories and the user controls which ones are in use.  All
such a change would do is make it easier to manage overlays - you'd
certainly not be required to use them.  Plus, right now with Gentoo
there is no way to set an overlay as being LOWER priority than the
main tree - so that you can grab packages not supported in main from
an overlay but still use the main packages when available.  That is,
unless you set up the overlay as your main tree and set up portage as
an overlay.

The approach paludis uses just seems simpler all-around, minus the
fact that it doesn't provide defaults for internals that need not be
exposed (vdb and such - which admittedly aren't needed by exherbo).

Rich