> > > ...is this something we (as the developer base) WANT non-dev's to be > able to do?? I would expect we'd want the tree to still be treated as > read-only-not-modifyable by the rest of the gentoo/linux community, > otherwise we're going to have a rather large mess on our hands > (multiple forks of the main tree != a uniform main tree + overlays, > the way it does now)
Yes, we want them to. There is still going to be a "master" authoritative tree, forks of that tree will exist for the purpose of adding new ebuilds to the master tree / bumping existing packages. If your worry is "There are copies of gentoo /usr/portage out there that aren't GIT HEAD" , then stop worrying, as thats already the case. As soon as somebody modifies a file in their local /usr/portage, that happens, and as soon as a users portage tree gets older than 1 hour, that happens. And if your worry is "But they could be replicating it in that form", then don't worry, they could already be doing that, nothing is stopping people from re-providing their full (tweaked) /usr/portage via rsync to others. In fact, if you're running in a network with a network master, you're doing that to an extent. But those sources are not official, and have no utility outside development/private use scenarios, and thus, don't compete with overlays directly. Sure, you *could* make something like an overlay by forking gentoo master and then maintaining that, but it would be impractical, and you'd be better off using a plain overlay ( less noise ), or using that fork for the purpose of getting things in master. You /could/ do a long-lived public maintained fork, and then you'd be Sabyon / Funtoo. Doing this has its own difficulties, but I think long term, enabling this is good: Sabyon/Funtoo can fork gentoo on github, and then any improvements made on their forks, gentoo can easily steal back, and its easier to track the differences between them. Win/Win in my books. Summarised: Yes, its a good idea. No, we shouldn't try stopping them. Actually, really can't stop them, its already happening, Git will just make the workflow better on top of it. -- Kent perl -e "print substr( \"edrgmaM SPA NOcomil.ic\\@tfrken\", \$_ * 3, 3 ) for ( 9,8,0,7,1,6,5,4,3,2 );" http://kent-fredric.fox.geek.nz
