On Fri, Jun 1, 2012 at 12:33 PM, Robin H. Johnson <robb...@gentoo.org> wrote: > What about overlay repositories that elect to be a branch of the main > tree via git? > > Do we call that forbidden usage?
I think that branches off of the main tree are mainly going to be useful for more eclass/profile/etc-related work. Work on a package or small group of packages will almost always go better in a completely independent overlay. If you try to do that kind of work in a branch then if you create an rsync tree from that branch it will contain all the other packages that you aren't working on, and they'll get stale very quickly. Anybody using that as an overlay will get a bunch of old ebuilds for who-knows-what in their tree. Now, branches in the main tree are going to be really useful for stuff like package moves, new virtuals, eclass api changes, or other messy changes that have big tree-wide impacts. You can stage the change and fix the 300 impacted ebuilds in a branch, get lots of people to test them, and then merge those in with a single transaction, pulling in updates from master all the while. That is more about portage tree maintenance than package maintenance per-se. All that said, having the tree in git is still a big help to proxy maintainers and others even with all these issues. I've worked as an outside contributor to other projects and it is a lot easier with git. I can easily work in my own PM, rebase against their master, and then easily submit a nice clean diff as a patch, even without doing any pushing at all. I don't have to have push rights to anything official to be more efficient in my contributions. Rich
