Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: The meaning of attributes in repositories.xml?

[Ionen Wolkens <ionen@gentoo.org>]

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On Fri, Mar 28, 2025 at 01:15:44PM +0500, Anna Vyalkova wrote:
> On 2025-03-28, Michał Górny wrote:
> > Hello,
> > 
> > I've looked at our repositories.xml and the quality/status attributes
> > don't seem to be used very meaningfully.
> > 
> > That is, by quality:
> > 
> > core: gentoo [official]
> > stable: opentransactions (?) [official (?!)]
> > testing: hyprland-overlay, moexiami [both unofficial]
> > experimental: everything else
> > graveyard: unused
> 
> No idea why it's named quality. "stable", "testing" and "experimental" 
> are only used in profiles. Packages also can have stable and testing 
> arch keywords.
> 
> Looks like reused terminology without any clear and unambiguous meaning 
> of each term.
> 
> > By status:
> > 
> > official: ago, alexxy, anarchy, andrey_utkin, cj-overlay, dilfridge,
> > emacs, EmilienMottet, fordfrog, gentoo, gnome, gnustep, graaff, guru,
> > haskell, java, jmbsvicetto, kde, libressl, maekke, masterlay, mschiff,
> > multilib-portage, musl, mysql, opentransactions, pentoo, pinkbyte,
> > qemu-init, qt, R_Overlay, rich0, riscv, rnp, ruby, science, sping,
> > swegener, tex-overlay, toolchain, ukui, ulm, vGist, voyageur, x11
> > 
> > unofficial: everything else
> 
> This makes sense: official repositories are maintained or managed by 
> Gentoo developers, unofficial repositories are maintained by 
> non-developers.
> 
> Well, should make sense, because "libressl" is also somehow official? It 
> used to be maintained by Gentoo, and likely this attribute just wasn't 
> updated after Gentoo had discontinued support for LibreSSL.

Yes, there's nothing official about it anymore. Claims (that I've
occasionally seen) that gentoo still "officially" supports libressl
through the overlay also shouldn't made. While it allows usage,
it is not Gentoo endorsed.

On that note, guess the term "official" for overlays may not be that
great in general. That sounds fine when associated with an actual
Gentoo project like GURU or KDE, but side-things that developers do
can be quite a mixed bag or just low quality testing stuff, and
calling them official feels a bit iffy (they'd probably be putting
these things in the main tree otherwise).

At best it's just trust indicator (wouldn't use Gentoo if didn't
trust the developers) which could use another word.

>  
> > Which brings the significant question: are these attributes in any way
> > meaningful?  Is there a point in keeping them at all?  Should we set
> > some ground rules and make them used consistently?
> 
> Even if they are meaningful, they are inconsistent and fall out of sync.  
> I wouldn't miss them :/
> 
> > Of them all, only "core" makes sense right now.  "stable" and "testing"
> > are used only by random user overlays, with no apparent features. 
> > Similarly, "official" is used by a mix of developer and ex-developer
> > repositories, developer and user project repositories, and a bunch of
> > user repositories with no clearly distinct features.
> 

-- 
ionen

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