Re: [gentoo-user] Gentoo's future directtion ?

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Fri, Nov 21, 2014 at 12:34 PM, James <wireless@tampabay.rr.com> wrote:
>
> Here's one, very, very interesting proposals, under
> serious consideration:
>
> https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Distributed_Gentoo
>
>
> I'd be curious what the fine and wonderful folks at
> gentoo_user think of this proposal. Old farts are
> welcome to comment, even encourage to "constructively rant"....

Honestly, I think it is a bit optimistic, though something I'd love to
see.  I'm more of a fan of getting the new working before dismantling
the old, and I'm not keen on proposals that start out with gutting
what we already have before there is anything new to replace it.
Burning bridges usually isn't wise.

The optimistic bit is that the proposal is that the only part of
Gentoo that would actually be developed centrally are the parts that
almost nobody is working on today.  That basically amounts to just
having all the developers quit, and hoping that they all move on to
work on overlays instead of moving on to something else.

There are a lot of technical challenges in such an approach -
supporting overlays isn't all that unlike trying to provide kernel
internal API stability.  I think it could be done better, but it would
be a big change.  IMHO it makes far more sense to make those changes
and use them for our own internal benefit in the main repository, and
THEN think about whether the main repository is still needed.

--
Rich