Re: [gentoo-project] [RFC] New project: GURU [Gentoo User Repository, Unreviewed]

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Mon, Feb 4, 2019 at 1:32 PM Mike <mpagano@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
> I guess we should figure out the level of support users can expect to
> receive from using this GURU repo.  If someone forks a package I
> maintain and then a user has issues I'm not sure how much 'official'
> support they can expect.  Certainly for complicated ebuilds, with
> 'multiple right' ways of doing things, this could result in an
> 'official' maintainer being at odds with the 'unoffical' one. Maybe we
> have that now?

The original proposal raised that question.  IMO we shouldn't allow
namespace conflicts with the main repo.  If the main repo has
courier-imap then no package can use that name in GURU. Now, if
somebody wants to maintain some fork of the package under a different
name that is fine.

And again I don't think we want to make it so that when a user
installs one random GURU package that they automatically start pulling
in every other package in that repo like they would a regular overlay.
That will make it much harder for them to stay aware of potential
issues.

That problem can actually exist in the main repo, but in practice it
doesn't come up much.  If somebody wanted to stick a renamed chromium
ebuild in the main repo that just defaults to duckduckgo or whatever
that would technically be allowed by policy I believe.  However, most
devs are just going to use user patch support to do this sort of
thing, especially considering the effort required to maintain a
parallel package like that.  There have been similar arguments over
default USE flags (and associated patches) for stuff like openssh and
bitcoin as well.  At least within the main repo we have a pretty
well-defined escalation path for QA/Council/etc.

-- 
Rich