On 12/09/2016 09:46 PM, Christopher Head wrote: > On Wed, 7 Dec 2016 12:15:06 -0500 > james <gar...@verizon.net> wrote: > >> Being able to use stage-4 or stage-5 (G. forums) installs to rapidly >> provision a collection of bare-metal systems [BGO-593218] into a wide >> variety of hardened clusters is my passion. Unikernels as stage 4 >> packages can then very easily be targeted for very specific needs: VM >> or container or bare-metal. Gentoo-proper is has too much political >> baggage to encourage folks to innovate, imho. So, I really hope the >> gentoo dev community gets behind the Anna Wilcox idea of streamlining >> Gentoo into the most fork-able distro on the planet. WE could all be >> one happy family and yet be very competitive with our ideas, trials >> and published results? Surely a few eggheads (academcis/pedantics) >> see the wisdom of competing micro_distros? Not unlike competing >> micro_breweries, it make the entire craft much stronger and better >> for all. >> >> >> Then there can be peace and harmony as everybody can do exactly as >> they please with their little cluster of gentoo and their very own >> portage-tree. And then folks running gentoo-proper now can pick and >> choose which innovations they want to include in the master tree. >> Isn't that pretty much what Google and CoreOS do now, as well as the >> gentoo derivative OS? Why not accelerate what has worked, for the >> few, to emancipate those of us still chained into user-land servitude. > > As an ordinary user, this sounds pretty bad. Forking is great for > developers, but bad for users. I don’t *want* 27 different > Gentoo-derived fork distributions, each of which is great at one thing. > I don’t want to have to reinstall a different OS just because I switch > from writing embedded code to running Octave. Honestly, I don’t even > want to go out and find other OS’s repos, add them as overlays, and > hope the inter-OS dependencies work. > > As an ordinary user, what I *want*, is to install one OS and not think > about it again. Ideally, Gentoo. When I want to do embedded > development, I just emerge dev-embedded/thingy. When I want to do some > math, I just emerge sci-mathematics/octave. Most things that most > people care about in the main tree. Breaking things up into overlays or > different OSs or whatever just means adding more hoops that I have to > jump through before I can start working on a new topic. >
Unfortunately even with a rich technical foundation (like Gentoo's) can't ensure that happens. Forks are patches around social problems or (sometimes, but rarely) technical disagreements. As much as some would insist that libre software is purely technical, there's an important and prevalent social component that influences the technical side. At some point or another, people can't work together and as a result the ebuilds scatter. Adding overlays via layman is dead-simple, and iirc you can use bugzie to file bugs against any official layman overlay. There *are* ways to deal with overlays in a mostly centralized manner. The layman list and bugzilla support goes a long way to making that possible, and the guys behind it did a great job. One Size Fits All is a dream. It sounds great on paper, but when it comes time to Just Do It™, you get all the messiness that comes with wetware and the disagreements on software. I see where you're coming from and yes, it'd be nice if we could all just use Gentoo. But reality (read: volunteering) doesn't work that way. If you have any issues with overlays, please, use the ML or #gentoo so somebody can help you out. -- Daniel Campbell - Gentoo Developer OpenPGP Key: 0x1EA055D6 @ hkp://keys.gnupg.net fpr: AE03 9064 AE00 053C 270C 1DE4 6F7A 9091 1EA0 55D6
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