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

[Alexander V Vershilov <alexander.vershilov@gmail.com>]

> 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.

--
Alexander