On Tue, Jun 10, 2014 at 4:57 AM, Thomas Kahle <to...@gentoo.org> wrote: > > My personal attitude: It is just not worth the effort to rewrite > their build systems for the ~10 users out there. I have better > things to do with my time and I think that these packages can > live forever in the overlay and that is completely OK this way.
I think this is a fairly common issue, actually. Many ebuilds live out in overlays (if they're lucky) or just in bugzilla (if not) simply because they have QA issues that nobody wants to deal with. I've seen ebuilds in bugzilla that get bumped as regularly as anything in the tree. QA can be a double-edged sword. Sometimes it can turn a good ebuild into a great one. At other times it can result in a fair-to-good ebuild leaving the tree entirely. I don't see overlays as a problem though. The main issue I've seen with them is when people make changes to the tree that requires updating reverse dependencies they don't update overlays, and users using overlays can end up being in a broken state for a time. Obviously we can never control whether overlays get updated, but we could require tree-wide updates like this to get announced, instead of just having a tracking bug that only notifies maintainers of impacted packages/etc. That would be more noise though, and likely bikeshedding that those making the changes want to avoid. Or we can just accept that those using overlays will have them break from time to time. Rich
