On Mon, May 22, 2006 at 10:29:22AM -0500, Grant Goodyear wrote: > > > > Agreed, I'm of the opinion it would be inappropriate to let an outside > > entity steer our primary package manager. > > I'm not sure I understand why. After all, mandriva, suse, ubuntu, and > many others have survived quite well.
And really never do anything innovative with their package managers; in fact apt and rpm haven't done anything new and interesting since the 90s. > More to the point, though, it's > not clear to me what awful things happen if Gentoo does not own the > package manager code, as long as that code is under a reasonable > license. Suppose that such a package manager did became a Gentoo > default, and at some point the program diverged from what Gentoo really > wanted; wouldn't Gentoo then just fork the package manager? Am I > missing something obvious? > Well, let's take the real life example of paludis vs. portage: Paludis is controlled by a former developer known for being hard to work with, Portage (being a Gentoo project) by necessitity has to be controlled by someone other developers can work with (else the council can intervene and fix the problem with new management). If the primary package manager is controlled by Gentoo, we exercise somewhat more control over the direction it takes in the first place and can avoid ever needing to fork or deal with any potentially poor upstream relations. -- Jon Portnoy avenj/irc.freenode.net -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
