Re: [gentoo-user] baselayout --> openrc ?

[Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>]

Apparently, though unproven, at 23:50 on Friday 22 October 2010, Zeerak 
Mustafa Waseem did opine thusly:

> > It's openrc-${PV}+1 - there's no question about that.
> >
> > 
> >
> > Until someone actually ponies up and commits something other than openrc
> > to  the tree, it's gonna stay on openrc.
> >
> > 
> >
> > I think you misunderstand what ~arch means.
> 
> I'll gladly be explained, just in case I should have it wrong. :-)
> 
> What I meant however was that there has been talk of starting a migration
> of ~arch users to devicekit when it is deemed ready. As far as I remember
> no conclusion was brought to that discussion other than openrc being moved
> inhouse and seeing how that went. So the ball is still in the air as far
> as openrc and a replacement goes, to my understanding.


~arch is the collection of unstable ebuilds in portage; stuff that is good 
enough for a release but not yet fully tested within a Gentoo system. With 
enough successful feedback from users, it is marked stable and moves to 
"arch".

~arch is not experimental, stuff planned for the future, someone's wicked 
overlay or anything else other than stable releases in a *gentoo* test phase, 
i.e. it's not so much the software that's being tested but the ebuild.

devicekit stands very little chance of ever being the default. It depends on 
dbus and expat. Remember hal and all the crap that came along with it? Gentoo 
is not Ubuntu or Fedora, it is installable on anything from ARM phones to 
IBM's gigantic hard iron. Why on earth would anyone mandate dbus to be 
compulsory on a headless server for example?

If you want to know what the future holds for Gentoo, best not to listen much 
to a bunch of dudes rambling on gentoo-dev and blogs. They're just talking, 
and talk is cheap. If you want to know what the future holds for @system and 
the toolchain, vapier is a good one to listen to. So's the council, GLEPs and 
whatever happens in voting. The kong thread that's been mentioned in this 
thread has a gem of a quote from vapier, something like:

"People saw Roy moving away from Gentoo, and freaked out."

That's it, nothing more. Some dudes freaked out.

Besides, lookee here:

nazgul ~ # eix -e devicekit
* sys-apps/devicekit
     Available versions:  (~)003 {doc}
     Homepage:            http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/DeviceKit
     Description:         D-Bus abstraction for enumerating devices and 
listening for device events using udev

nazgul ~ # eix -e dbus-glib
[I] dev-libs/dbus-glib
     Available versions:  0.86 (~)0.88 {bash-completion debug doc static-libs 
test}
     Installed versions:  0.88(00:25:33 12/10/10)(bash-completion -debug -doc 
-static-libs -test)
     Homepage:            http://dbus.freedesktop.org/
     Description:         D-Bus bindings for glib

nazgul ~ # eix systemd
No matches found.

devicekit has one version (003) and systemd doesn't even have an ebuild in the 
tree. That system is probably sitting about where openrc was when Roy had 
gotten to 20% of where he eventually took it.

openrc works, it has three outstanding edge case blocker bugs. What possible 
technical reason is there to go chasing butterflies down some totally unproven 
path?

-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com