[gentoo-portage-dev] layout.conf: What's our opinion?

[Sebastian Luther <SebastianLuther@gmx.de>]

Hi all,

${repository}/metadata/layout.conf is a file that allows a repository
maintainer to adjust the package manager's behavior for a repository.
I guess the best known is the 'masters' key, but there are lots of other
things by now (see man portage).

Currently layout.conf is not under PMS control. This basically means
that every PM (or version thereof) may support different keys and assign
different meanings to them. Portage's behavior for unknown keys in
layout.conf is to ignore them without a warning.

The bad thing about this is that some layout.conf keys portage currently
supports, may render the repository unusable for a PM if it doesn't
support them.

To avoid this type of breakage in other areas (ebuilds, dependency
resolution, ...) PMS has been created. Since the council demands PMS to
be followed, I would expect that they also want the general idea "of not
breaking things randomly" to be followed.

This brings us to reason that made me write that mail. Some days ago
Arfrever committed some additions to layout.conf [1], for which he
apparently had the ack from Zac from some months ago [2].

After discussing this one IRC I came to the conclusion that we just
disagree on how we should handle additions to layout.conf.

Basically it's either
1) "We add things as we see fit." or
2) "We should only add things if absolutely necessary.".

I obviously would prefer 2) to follow the "things shouldn't break
randomly" route.

So what's your opinion? Should we go for 1) or 2) or something else?

- Sebastian


[1]
http://git.overlays.gentoo.org/gitweb/?p=proj/portage.git;a=commit;h=4c409a049c394389b1de398db511380e2fed0437

[2] http://dpaste.com/1560782/