On Sat, 16 Jun 2012 20:59:18 +0200 Pacho Ramos <pa...@gentoo.org> wrote: > > Naah. This is one of those things that requires developers to put > > quite a lot of exta effort in to their packages in order to improve > > the quality of experience for users, which means it's not going to > > be suitable for Gentoo's development model. > > Well, not all people have infinite time to put that huge effort you > sometimes would demand us to make things work perfectly :|
There are two problems with that answer. Firstly, if getting something right takes a developer an extra ten minutes but saves each user one second of effort, it should be considered highly worthwhile. The fact that it isn't reflects very poorly upon Gentoo's attitude towards its users. Secondly, most of Gentoo's effort these days seems to be being spent cleaning up self-inflicted problems. "Technical debt" really is an issue here. By not doing things properly now, you're just adding to the problems facing future developers. > (and looks like Exherbo developer also have the same problem as this > model is still not implemented there, no? And that is normal, they > also have time constraints for sure) Exherbo's generally pretty good at "rewrite all the packages!" type things. Partly that's because there are fewer packages (but then there are much better mechanisms for handling unpackaged packages), but it's also because QA and having a clean architecture are taken seriously there. Exherbo does have := and :*, and makes heavier use of slotting than Gentoo (partly due to having a much better 'alternatives' implementation). It doesn't have parts, because I've not had time to work out exactly how to get the resolver to do them cleanly. Once the package mangler side is done, experience has shown that there will be a very short delay before every relevant package is using it. -- Ciaran McCreesh
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