Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> Marcus D. Hanwell wrote:
>> On Saturday 16 September 2006 09:51, Andrey G. Grozin wrote:
>>> On Fri, 15 Sep 2006, Marcus D. Hanwell wrote:
>>>> On Friday 15 September 2006 08:50, Andrey G. Grozin wrote:
>>>>> On Thu, 14 Sep 2006, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
>>>>>> Pretty sure they're not interested in linking to external overlays.
>>>>>> If you want a link, and to save some time on maintenance and future
>>>>>> breakage, it might be easier to just migrate to their hosting.
>>>>> I think this is an excellent idea. First-class inofficial overlays live
>>>>> at overlays.gentoo.org; we want the same status, we don't want to be
>>>>> second- (or third-) class.
>>>> I think this statement is incorrect about first or second class overlays.
>>>> According to their own FAQs that is not the case. My own personal belief
>>>> says it certainly is not that case. To make a more reasoned case you have
>>>> to ask what the actual benefits of a move might be, i.e. bigger admin
>>>> team, more widely used/tested, shiny gentoo.org domain ending...
>>>>
>>>> But like I said in my last response if the overall opinion is to move I
>>>> will make the subversion repo backup available for migration of the
>>>> overlay. I set it up as a service for the Gentoo scientific community
>>>> before any of this was available as we were sick of waiting for it to
>>>> appear... Now it has may be the overlay would be better there. I am not
>>>> sure - I doubt it would hurt though...
>>> Suppose I am a Gentoo user, and I want to try some new package (or a
>>> bleeding-edge version) which is not in the main tree. I search the Gentoo
>>> website for links to some experimental overlays (something like rpmforge
>>> and freshrpms in the RedHat world). And aha! I find overlays.gentoo.org
>>> (and nothing else). If the package I want is in one of the overlays there,
>>> I am happy. If not, I am stuck.
>>>
>>> In other words, overlays.gentoo.org lives on the Gentoo continent;
>>> gentooscience.org is an island in the middle of nowhere.
>> May be that is where our opinions of what the overlay is for are very 
>> different. I never set the overlay up with general users in mind, and that 
>> wasn't what we discussed when we were thinking about why we needed an 
>> overlay.
>>
>> In my opinion the overlay is there for interested users wishing to take a 
>> bigger role in development, using experimental ebuilds and helping to improve 
>> them until they are ready to go into the tree. As such I was never interested 
>> in trying to get the attention of some user searching for a particular ebuild. 
>> All ebuilds which are suitable should be moved into the main tree 
>> anyway and so the user will find it there...
>>
>> I never tried to keep the overlay secret, but why should users have to 
>> set up a myriad of overlays if they just want to run a system? May be you 
>> would be better off becoming a developer and adding stuff to the tree? If we 
>> follow a trend of keeping more and more stuff in various overlays then Gentoo 
>> just becomes more of a pain to run IMHO.
> 
> There's a middle ground, where current developers don't want to maintain
> a package, but the non-developer with commit access to an overlay
> doesn't want to commit the time to become a developer. This is where
> things end up staying in overlays even though they're theoretically
> ready for the tree. This is why it's useful for users to be able to find
> overlays.
> 
> Layman has made it trivially easy to add overlays already, so it's
> really much of a pain at all.

*not* much of a pain. Sorry it's late =)

Also, there's another middle ground where things are good enough to be
usable but not good enough to go into the main tree.

Thanks,
Donnie