[gentoo-dev] Re: DistroWatch and Gentoo packages: status quo and future

[Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@cox.net>]

Jesús Guerrero posted on Sun, 13 Sep 2009 11:11:42 +0200 as excerpted:

> On Sat, 12 Sep 2009 01:02:44 +0200, Sebastian Pipping
> <webmaster@hartwork.org> wrote:
>> 
>> Among other information the Gentoo page at DistroWatch [1] displays a
>> table on about 200 selected packages [2] and how up to date Gentoo is
>> per package.  I assume that DistroWatch is still one of the first
>> places people go to get a feeling for a Distro they heard about,
>> besides Wikpedia and ${distro}.org.
> 
> Seriously, I doubt that the average Gentoo user comes from Distrowatch.
> Gentoo is born from a necessity which is very different from the usual
> binary distro. Gentoo has never been about fame or marketing.

++

[package listing of not in Gentoo tree or way outdated]
>>   Miro
>>     .. Not in official tree (yet?), available through an Overlay
>> 
>>   xmms
>>     .. Removed for security reasons, available through an Overlay
>> 
>> Maybe we should move Miro to the main tree?
> 
> Most Gentoo users will have no problem to use overlays as they need
> them.

Agreed.  Yes, overlays are perhaps a bit more trouble to setup than 
simply maintaining normal tree updates once setup.  But let's get some 
context here.  layman's no difficulty at all, really, when compared to 
the ordinary stuff we expect Gentoo users to do all the time.  Gentoo has 
never been about spoon-feeding and this is no exception.  Layman is a 
great and powerful tool, certainly, and like any powerful tool, it takes 
a bit of learning to use, before even the user should trust himself with 
it. =:^)  But that's more true of Gentoo itself than it is of layman, and 
anyone who can manage Gentoo can certainly manage layman with little 
trouble.

> If we had more developers we could as maintain more packages, as
> simple as that.

Indeed.

> Besides that, if you want some new version, you are free to use
> bugs.gentoo.org to submit a bug, version bump, or whatever.

I'm not so sure about this.  Sure, one can submit a bug, but would that 
have done any good on, say, kde4, one popular overlay people use, 
particularly during the period that portage didn't work with it?  What 
about the kde sets?  Would they be allowed in the tree just based on a 
bug?  The obvious answer is no, and there's good reasons for it.

I can see the argument both ways for putting stuff like that in the main 
tree -- masked, of course, and possibly in an obscure location that the 
PMs could ignore unless configured otherwise.  Personally, I'd like to 
see more of it in the main tree, hard-masked when necessary, instead of 
in the overlays.  But I have a strong suspicion I'd feel otherwise if I 
were one of the devs tasked with getting packages like that, particularly 
huge interrelated conglomerations of packages like that, actually into 
some sort of usable working (for ordinary Gentoo users. altho as I said 
above, they're already a cut above ordinary users) shape.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman