On 06/13/2013 12:56 AM, Alexander V Vershilov wrote: >> The main reason it isn't is because nobody wants to use CVS. For >> good examples, see sunrise or >> gentoo-haskell. > > As a part of gentoo-haskell team, I'd like to say that CVS issue is > not strongest one, there are much more meaningful reasons for having > much stuff in overlays at least for haskell. > > IMHO: > > The main point that haskell ecosystem is very breaky and only latest > version is supported, so the safest path is to be on a bleeding edge > and patch inconsistent applications. So if one package gets updated > then commonly we need to fix its reversed deps, if it were in tree > than we would be involved into stabilization process and in the end > will delay updating deps, and the difficulty of tracking all version > variant will be much higher than no, at the end the quality of the > packages in tree will fall. Really we can _guarantee_ that everything > work in overlay but there is either no technical or bureaucracy > reasons that prevent from fixing as soon as possible. > > All above is applicable because in overlay we work on programmers > libraries, with enduser > applications (that are synchronized with portage tree) situation is > slightly different. >
To be clear, I meant that sunrise and gentoo-haskell were good examples of overlays where e.g. subversion and git have made user contributions much easier. I don't agree that up-to-date libraries need to be in an overlay -- why not ~arch or package.mask instead, and leave the platform to stable? -- but I benefit greatly from (and appreciate) the fact that you guys are able to merge my pull requests into the overlay quickly so I can't complain too much.
