Re: [gentoo-dev] last rites: sys-fs/eudev

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Thu, Sep 14, 2023 at 1:39 PM Eddie Chapman <eddie@ehuk.net> wrote:
>
> If you don't like it, then just go and roll your own. Of course
> I know I (and anyone else) can do that. So then what's the point of
> discussing anything then?

This is a fair question, but I think you're missing how most FOSS work
gets done in practice. Look at this list.  95% of it are FYIs from
devs talking about the work they've already done.  "I've introduced
this new feature - here is how you need to adjust what you're doing to
take advantage of it" - and so on.

If there is discussion about hypothetical future changes, it is
typically because somebody already plans to do the work and they're
soliciting advice, or working towards council approval for a breaking
change (ie a change that impacts other packages in the repo).

In any case, most of the reactions on this list were probably
anticipated before eudev was masked, so the discussion isn't really
informing any decisions.

As I said before the thing that would be most likely to change the
course of events is somebody stepping up to maintain things, and if
that happens it probably won't involve much discussion on the list
anyway.  They'd just fix things.

> What's the point of having a big tree with
> hundreds of packages? Why not have a very minimal tree instead and let
> everyone go and run multiple independent repos so we can all do what we
> want?

Actually, I would kind-of prefer if Gentoo were organized in just such
a way, but to make it practical the package manager would need a bit
of enhancement (such as letting users prioritize repositories at the
individual package level, a reasonable system of cross-repo
dependencies, and better tools for tagging repos and communicating the
QA standards for them and taking this into consideration when
syncing).

You won't see me badgering the portage team to make it possible
though, because that would be a lot of work, and if I cared about it
that much I'd be just asking for a few guidelines and making my own
PRs.

-- 
Rich