[gentoo-project] PMS

[gentoo-project] PMS

[Steve Long]

Just a quick post re something that was raised in the council meeting. My
understanding is that portage is the official package manager for Gentoo,
and will stay that way for the conceivable future. Other package managers
are supported as much as any other externally-hosted project is supported,
although they can in a sense be considered downstream of Gentoo.

In a meeting of the last council:
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/council/meeting-logs/20070816.txt
the consensus seemed to be that it is important as:
<wolf31o2|work> if the document is incorrect and a package manager is
released following the incorrect spec, you *will* break boxes

It was brought in-house as there had been no development on the spec for a
substantial period of time, and it was holding up portage releases.
Additionally:
<vapier> if the route we're going is that we dont add crazy things to
EAPI/PMS unless we cover it in gentoo-dev, then having it be with the
current package manager would lessen that maintenance

The question which came up was:
<robbat2> if we fork it to inhouse, will the inhouse fork still have enough
momentum?
As there had been no movement on the document for a year, it didn't seem
important, but it is the situation now occurring:
* Philantrop considers the place where the actual *work* takes place as
authoritative until something significant happens in our repo.

The concern I have with this is that PMS as developed by an external team is
now being seen as authoritative for the whole of Gentoo.

<zmedico> EAPI bumps should be based on input from the general ebuild
developer community I think, since the the purpose of EAPI bumps is to give
them features that they want.

I accept that occasional threads are posted to dev m-l about proposals in
PMS, but that is not the same as moving back to a situation where perhaps
the fundamental Gentoo spec is developed by an upstream software provider.

It has technical implications for the interoperability of all package
managers, and if one of those teams is to be responsible for its
development, I feel it should be the portage ones who have the final word
on what is, and is not, "authoritative" for all Gentoo devs writing
ebuilds.

If that's about to change, I for one think it's a bad idea.

Interesting article wrt the cat herd ;) s/guild/team/; s/alliance/project
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_124/
2645-Riding-the-Failure-Cascade
<that's all on one line>
"An effective protection for any guild is to simply have fun."


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Re: [gentoo-project] PMS

[Marius Mauch]

On Sat, 15 Dec 2007 06:46:32 +0000
Steve Long <slong@rathaus.eclipse.co.uk> wrote:

> The concern I have with this is that PMS as developed by an external
> team is now being seen as authoritative for the whole of Gentoo.

No version of PMS is authorative until it actually gets approved, and
all existing versions are just drafts. And an approved version would be
a finished document, not a repository, so the location or who works on
it is meaningless in this regard, though it might have an effect on
which versions will eventually get approved.

Marius
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[gentoo-project] Re: PMS

[Steve Long]

Marius Mauch wrote:

> On Sat, 15 Dec 2007 06:46:32 +0000
> Steve Long <slong@rathaus.eclipse.co.uk> wrote:
> 
>> The concern I have with this is that PMS as developed by an external
>> team is now being seen as authoritative for the whole of Gentoo.
> 
> No version of PMS is authorative until it actually gets approved, and
> all existing versions are just drafts. And an approved version would be
> a finished document, not a repository, so the location or who works on
> it is meaningless in this regard, though it might have an effect on
> which versions will eventually get approved.
> 
Ah thanks for the clarification, genone. Makes me feel more relaxed about
it, although I note that others are clearly taking the draft as
authoritative. I hope there won't be backlash if people start writing
ebuilds using new features, only for them not to be approved for the Gentoo
PMS.

There is no guarantee, aiui, that just because the Paludis guys have
designed and implemented something and put it in the draft PMS hosted
externally, it will be implemented, either in the same way or at all, in
portage and pkgcore. That starts to cause dev mindshare issues, imo, and
could lead to further acrimony later on down the line.

It will surely lead to more disparaging comments about portage, as we have
already seen. Personally I find them annoying simply because portage has
built so many Gentoo systems, which we all use out of choice.


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Re: [gentoo-project] PMS

[Roy Bamford]

On 2007.12.15 06:46, Steve Long wrote:
> Just a quick post re something that was raised in the council 
> meeting.
> 

Steve,

The offical package manager is portage. If another package manager does 
something different to portage - even if it fixes a bug in portage, by 
definition, its not compliant.

The exisiting PMS have been arrived at by documenting what portage 
does, which is itself a moving target.
No PMS is likely to be endorsed until Portage stays still long enough 
to document it, check it and ratifiy it, unless some arbitary portage 
version is chosen to document.

Any such PMS won't be very useful, as portage will have moved on 
meanwhile. A PMS will only be useful when its adopted and maintained by 
the portage devs, when portage will become a reference inplementaion of 
the spec. I don't see that happening, since they don't need such a 
document. 

It reminds me of AMD, Cyrix and others trying to produce a x86 CPU 
clone. Most got close but not close enough as they failed to reproduce 
the bugs in the silicon that were in some cases needed for normal 
operation. AMD persisted and got a reasonable market share. Intel 
didn't make it easy, releasing new CPUs from time to time.

At least developers wanting a PMS can read the portage source code to 
see what it does.

Regards,

Roy Bamford
(NeddySeagoon)
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Re: [gentoo-project] PMS

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Sat, 15 Dec 2007 16:30:48 +0000
Roy Bamford <neddyseagoon@gentoo.org> wrote:
> The offical package manager is portage. If another package manager
> does something different to portage - even if it fixes a bug in
> portage, by definition, its not compliant.

Incorrect. The Council has stated that once PMS has been accepted, any
PMS compliant package manager is acceptable, and any package manager
deviating from PMS is buggy.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh

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Re: [gentoo-project] PMS

[Denis Dupeyron]

On Dec 15, 2007 5:48 PM, Ciaran McCreesh
<ciaran.mccreesh@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
> Incorrect. The Council has stated that once PMS has been accepted [...]

Which has yet to happen.

Denis.
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Re: [gentoo-project] PMS

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Sat, 15 Dec 2007 21:18:08 +0100
"Denis Dupeyron" <calchan@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On Dec 15, 2007 5:48 PM, Ciaran McCreesh
> <ciaran.mccreesh@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
> > Incorrect. The Council has stated that once PMS has been accepted
> > [...]
> 
> Which has yet to happen.

Well no. But that doesn't stop what Roy said from being utter nonsense.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh

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Re: [gentoo-project] PMS

[George Prowse]

Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> On Sun, 16 Dec 2007 00:58:15 +0000
> George Prowse <cokehabit@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
>>> On Sat, 15 Dec 2007 21:18:08 +0100
>>> "Denis Dupeyron" <calchan@gentoo.org> wrote:
>>>> On Dec 15, 2007 5:48 PM, Ciaran McCreesh
>>>> <ciaran.mccreesh@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
>>>>> Incorrect. The Council has stated that once PMS has been accepted
>>>>> [...]
>>>> Which has yet to happen.
>>> Well no. But that doesn't stop what Roy said from being utter
>>> nonsense.
>>>
>> But which would hold more weight?
> 
> Huh?
> 
ok, lets put it in easy language...

If a package manager that Gentoo uses happens to use ebuilds, right? And 
the main developer of another package manager thinks that it shouldn't 
be used for that reason then it would be logical to never use that PM 
for PACKAGE MANAGEMENT. Right?

Actually, that would give pretty much anything weight over said PM.

http://lab.obsethryl.eu/content/paludis-gentoo-and-ciaran-mccreesh-uncensored
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[gentoo-project] Re: PMS

[Steve Long]

Roy Bamford wrote:
> Steve,
> 
> The offical package manager is portage. If another package manager does
> something different to portage - even if it fixes a bug in portage, by
> definition, its not compliant.
>
I take it as the spec is what portage is /supposed/ to do, assuming no bugs.
That's not hard to quantify, since portage normally works pretty well (you
get an occasional testing release that introduces a bug or regression,
which is to be expected) and the portage team know what it's supposed to
do, and are forthcoming to other projects.

The only bug I've found that annoys me, and hasn't been fixed, is the one
where it doesn't pick up that a blocking package is about to be updated
before the blockee, so the block will no longer apply. This is easy for a
user to spot, so it's easy for a script to fix, and we implemented that
workaround in update months ago.

I'm totally happy with portage and trust its dev team. I know full well that
2.2 is in the works and have no issue waiting for it to get here, as in the
meantime portage has worked reliably, as the install base shows.

> The exisiting PMS have been arrived at by documenting what portage
> does, which is itself a moving target.
> No PMS is likely to be endorsed until Portage stays still long enough
> to document it, check it and ratifiy it, unless some arbitary portage
> version is chosen to document.
>
I think we should talk more about EAPI than PMS. That's what ebuild devs
work to, a BASH api to the most part, with specification of how strings are
composed and what they mean to the PM.

> Any such PMS won't be very useful, as portage will have moved on
> meanwhile. A PMS will only be useful when its adopted and maintained by
> the portage devs, when portage will become a reference inplementaion of
> the spec. I don't see that happening, since they don't need such a
> document.
>
I agree that the EAPI is not fixed until it's agreed and implemented by
portage. The PMS thing seems extraneous to Gentoo needs atm; it's more to
enable other projects to interoperate with the tree. It certainly wasn't
needed for pkgcore imo.


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Re: [gentoo-project] Re: PMS

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Sun, 16 Dec 2007 14:31:38 +0000
Steve Long <slong@rathaus.eclipse.co.uk> wrote:
> I agree that the EAPI is not fixed until it's agreed and implemented
> by portage. The PMS thing seems extraneous to Gentoo needs atm; it's
> more to enable other projects to interoperate with the tree. It
> certainly wasn't needed for pkgcore imo.

Erm. You need to learn the relationship between EAPI and PMS.

PMS describes EAPIs 0 and 1, and will describe any future EAPIs once
they're agreed upon.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh

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[gentoo-project] Re: Re: PMS

[Steve Long]

Ciaran McCreesh wrote:

> On Sun, 16 Dec 2007 14:31:38 +0000
> Steve Long <slong@rathaus.eclipse.co.uk> wrote:
>> I agree that the EAPI is not fixed until it's agreed and implemented
>> by portage. The PMS thing seems extraneous to Gentoo needs atm; it's
>> more to enable other projects to interoperate with the tree. It
>> certainly wasn't needed for pkgcore imo.
> 
> Erm. You need to learn the relationship between EAPI and PMS.
> 
> PMS describes EAPIs 0 and 1, and will describe any future EAPIs once
> they're agreed upon.
> 
It does a bit more than that. And like I said, that's extraneous to Gentoo
needs, and is in fact only really needed for Paludis, not pkgcore and
certainly not portage development.

The last Council made that clear when they took the PMS in-house due to the
lack of progress:
<wolf31o2|work> Gentoo has no need for a PMS if we're only supporting
portage... it was written pretty much exclusively to allow external package
managers to be on the same page as portage
<kingtaco|work> it's possible that any PMS is of primary use for external
projects and perhaps we don't need to involve ourselves
<robbat2> i see the goal of PMS as allowing external PMs to be supported in
Gentoo

I wonder how far you'd get with trying to, say, supplant rpm in RedHat, or
apt in debian. Surely they must be crying out for a next-gen PM? Oh yeah,
you need the Gentoo devs to maintain ebuilds or paludis won't work.

<kingtaco|work> no, the discussion on -dev ml defines eapi bumps

Having a spec isn't an issue: the issue is having it developed as a
mainstream Gentoo project, with open discussion. Frankly you're not very
good at that, in so far as your manner does not invite discussion; you've
made it quite clear that you think many of the devs (whose work your
project relies on), let alone the users, are "idiots".


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Re: [gentoo-project] Re: Re: PMS

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Mon, 17 Dec 2007 07:17:32 +0000
Steve Long <slong@rathaus.eclipse.co.uk> wrote:
> > PMS describes EAPIs 0 and 1, and will describe any future EAPIs once
> > they're agreed upon.
> > 
> It does a bit more than that.

Mmmm, nope. Unless you mean "has an introduction page"...

> And like I said, that's extraneous to Gentoo needs, and is in fact
> only really needed for Paludis, not pkgcore and certainly not portage
> development.

It's entirely needed for Portage development. Without PMS, no change to
Portage is allowed to break any existing ebuild, no matter how stupid
what that ebuild is doing.

> The last Council made that clear when they took the PMS in-house due
> to the lack of progress:

Which is kind of weird, given that there's plenty of progress... Also
kind of weird that no-one in said Council or anywhere else has bothered
to tell me about this in-house copy of the repository...

> <wolf31o2|work> Gentoo has no need for a PMS if we're only supporting
> portage... it was written pretty much exclusively to allow external
> package managers to be on the same page as portage

Untrue.

> <kingtaco|work> it's possible that any PMS is of primary use for
> external projects and perhaps we don't need to involve ourselves

Possible. Not true.

> <robbat2> i see the goal of PMS as allowing external PMs to be
> supported in Gentoo

Partially true, in that it's one of the goals.

> I wonder how far you'd get with trying to, say, supplant rpm in
> RedHat, or apt in debian. Surely they must be crying out for a
> next-gen PM?

You mean "I wonder how far you'd get with trying to, say, supplant
dselect in debian".

Oh, right.

You'll note that RPM and APT have proper specifications, and aren't
defined in terms of any particular implementation.

> Oh yeah, you need the Gentoo devs to maintain ebuilds or
> paludis won't work.

Which has what to do with anything? (It's also untrue, but hey, that's
a separate issue.)

> <kingtaco|work> no, the discussion on -dev ml defines eapi bumps

You're taking things out of context. Discussion on -dev (or rather,
bugzilla) is used to decide what goes in an EAPI. The EAPI itself is
described formally elsewhere.

> Having a spec isn't an issue: the issue is having it developed as a
> mainstream Gentoo project, with open discussion.

Anyone who knows what they're talking about is more than welcome to
discuss things. Anyone who doesn't, which clearly includes you at this
point, is more than welcome to go and do the necessary research.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh

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Re: [gentoo-project] Re: Re: PMS

[Ferris McCormick]

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On Mon, 2007-12-17 at 07:17 +0000, Steve Long wrote:
> Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> 
> > On Sun, 16 Dec 2007 14:31:38 +0000
> > Steve Long <slong@rathaus.eclipse.co.uk> wrote:
> >> I agree that the EAPI is not fixed until it's agreed and implemented
> >> by portage. The PMS thing seems extraneous to Gentoo needs atm; it's
> >> more to enable other projects to interoperate with the tree. It
> >> certainly wasn't needed for pkgcore imo.
> > 
> > Erm. You need to learn the relationship between EAPI and PMS.
> > 
> > PMS describes EAPIs 0 and 1, and will describe any future EAPIs once
> > they're agreed upon.
> > 
> It does a bit more than that. And like I said, that's extraneous to Gentoo
> needs, and is in fact only really needed for Paludis, not pkgcore and
> certainly not portage development.
> 
> The last Council made that clear when they took the PMS in-house due to the
> lack of progress:
> <wolf31o2|work> Gentoo has no need for a PMS if we're only supporting
> portage... it was written pretty much exclusively to allow external package
> managers to be on the same page as portage
> <kingtaco|work> it's possible that any PMS is of primary use for external
> projects and perhaps we don't need to involve ourselves
> <robbat2> i see the goal of PMS as allowing external PMs to be supported in
> Gentoo
> 

Well, you've awakened me with this.  I must have missed that exchange,
but that's silly.  PMS is a specification and is useful for anyone who
works with packages, regardless of package manager.  Or for any new
portage developers for that matter.  It's easier for everyone if the
behavior of any package manager you choose (portage or pkgcore or
paludis or ...) is defined by a specification rather than by just what
the code does.

> I wonder how far you'd get with trying to, say, supplant rpm in RedHat, or
> apt in debian. Surely they must be crying out for a next-gen PM? Oh yeah,
> you need the Gentoo devs to maintain ebuilds or paludis won't work.
> 
> <kingtaco|work> no, the discussion on -dev ml defines eapi bumps
> 
> Having a spec isn't an issue: the issue is having it developed as a
> mainstream Gentoo project, with open discussion. Frankly you're not very
> good at that, in so far as your manner does not invite discussion; you've
> made it quite clear that you think many of the devs (whose work your
> project relies on), let alone the users, are "idiots".
> 
I don't know that it matters where it comes from; what matters is that
it is correct.  I understand that this statement probably puts me on the
fringe.

Regards,
Ferris
-- 
Ferris McCormick (P44646, MI) <fmccor@gentoo.org>
Developer, Gentoo Linux (Devrel, Sparc, Userrel)

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[gentoo-project] Re: Re: Re: PMS

[Steve Long]

Ferris McCormick wrote:
> PMS is a specification and is useful for anyone who
> works with packages, regardless of package manager.  Or for any new
> portage developers for that matter.  It's easier for everyone if the
> behavior of any package manager you choose (portage or pkgcore or
> paludis or ...) is defined by a specification rather than by just what
> the code does.
>
I agree 100% that the EAPI ebuild authors can expect should be documented
and specified precisely. The concern was over process, as to whether the
stance has changed wrt the PMS hosted on Gentoo infra being
the "authorised" version.

>> Having a spec isn't an issue: the issue is having it developed as a
>> mainstream Gentoo project, with open discussion. Frankly you're not very
>> good at that, in so far as your manner does not invite discussion; you've
>> made it quite clear that you think many of the devs (whose work your
>> project relies on), let alone the users, are "idiots".
>> 
> I don't know that it matters where it comes from; what matters is that
> it is correct.  I understand that this statement probably puts me on the
> fringe.
> 
Certainly correctness is vital. Wrt to discussing future changes, the manner
in which that is done matters too, imo.

As genone pointed out, it won't be authorised until the Council approve it,
so my main concern is alleviated.


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Re: [gentoo-project] Re: Re: PMS

[Thomas Anderson]

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On Monday 17 December 2007 02:17:32 Steve Long wrote:
> It does a bit more than that. And like I said, that's extraneous to Gentoo
> needs, and is in fact only really needed for Paludis, not pkgcore and
> certainly not portage development.

As ciaranm pointed out, thats completely untrue. For one thing, PMS documents 
how ebuilds are written(somewhat).  PMS is used for things besides 
paludis/pkgcore/portage. For an example, see app-portage/gatt-svn. 
Gatt(written by mlangc) had to implement an atom parser. The only way this 
would be easily done was through PMS. So yes, PMS is useful besides the 3 
package managers.

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