[gentoo-osx] The road ahead?

[Grobian <grobian@gentoo.org>]

Since it "is silly if you want things to work before several years off"
[1], perhaps it's not that useful to discuss this issue.  However, we
can all dream, can't we, so let's just do it(tm).

I will try to carve a few roads in the sand in this mail that should
somehow reflect what I think the things to discuss are, if we really
want to get moving towards our holy grail.  Considering [1], this might
be all useless afterward, but ok.

My personal targets for this project are as follows:
1. Make Gentoo for OSX an acceptable sub-project of the Gentoo family.
2. Get a prefixed install to make Gentoo for OSX comparative to Fink and
   Darwin Ports, and quality wise go beyond.

Both two targets require some extra explanation.
1. Gentoo for OSX functions as "black sheep" of the Gentoo family.  In
   that way we put a spell on not only ourselves, but also on the
   Gentoo/Alt project -- which is a good candidate for the second black
   sheep.  It may be just that some people don't like the smell of non
   GNU/Linux stuff, but there are also constructive comments which
   cannot be denied.
   - My current stategy is to just show some goodwill, by for instance
     reacting swift and accurate to security bugs, as my impression is
     that those have been ignored in the past.  But not only securty
     bugs, all bugs where we get involved I try to react within
     reasonable time, just to show we care.  Well I do.  Of course any
     support in this gets a warm welcome from me.
   - In cooperation with others (mostly vapier) I try to reduce the
     ebuild "spam" caused by ppc-macos.  An example is the big
     anti conditional bug [2] which unfortunately hasn't got much of
     my attention yet.  The idea is simple: make unconditional stuff
     just to ease maintenance and keep ebuilds slim and pure.
2. A prefixed install for me means having a way to install into
   /Library/Gentoo, /Gentoo, /Users/Library/Gentoo or wherever.  I don't
   really care about the location, and a system wide install would be
   fine with me too.  I envision that a touch discussion on variable
   prefixes, or homedir prefixes and whatever will follow if not yet
   have been on the portage channels.  What I would like to see is that
   we can play with it, maybe not in its ideal state, but those
   improvements can be made while we're playing.
   - Although I have seen signals that we're close to something like
     this (kudos to Kito and Brian) in the mean-while I try to cope with
     the bugfloods ;).  Keywording the low-hanging fruit (those ebuilds
     with little or none USE-flags that just compile out of the box)
     reduces the number of open bugs and should be ok when in a prefix
     too.  Having more keyworded in portage prepares us a bit for the
     grand "Fink challenge" too.
   - To reach a good quality we will have to reenable the normal
     keywording scheme again.  This will only be done once we have a
     prefixed installer.  From that point, the imlate scripts and such
     count for us too.  Problem there is that we will have to maintain
     the whole tree, like for instance the AMD64 guys do.  We're
     outnumbered and hence I think we could use some extra devs that
     have more free time on their hands than most of us now.

To conclude a short note on various flavours of the project, such as
progressive and darwin.  I am not interested in those myself.  My main
focus is on the 'consumer product', which should be the mainline
product, or the collision-protect profiles as they are called now.  The
fact that I am not interested (yet) into these profiles, does not mean I
will never support them.  I would just like to focus on getting the
mainline (normal users) product going, then if people have a personal
target to create a progressive profile for instance, I will not stop
such development -- not even wondering on how I would be able to stop it
anyway.  I consider one of my personal wishes for a 64-bit install to
be a profile that should walk the same path like a progressive profile:
it should wait till there is a working mainline product.


[1] ciaranm@gentoo.org in gentoo-alt@gentoo.org (not archived on gmane)
[2] http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=108029

-- 
Fabian Groffen
Gentoo for Mac OS X Project -- Interim Lead
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